Trump-appointed IRS head resigns over egregious privacy violations

Hillary Clinton didn’t want to use two BlackBerries update;

The acting head of the IRS plans to resign after being bypassed over a new agreement to share the tax data of undocumented immigrants with Homeland Security personnel, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Acting IRS commissioner Melanie Krause — the tax agency’s third leader since President Donald Trump’s inauguration — will participate in the deferred resignation program the Trump administration offered to agency employees in recent days, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Disagreements over the agency’s direction also factored into Krause’s decision to leave, the people said.

Losing three agency leaders in three months is “unprecedented,” one of the people said. “I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this at IRS.”

Treasury Department officials in recent days sought to circumvent IRS executives so immigration authorities could access private taxpayer information, the people said. Those conversations largely excluded Krause’s input.

Trump’s IRS, where the data can be used for any purpose but to collect taxes from rich people, and no promise means anything:

“Could be illegal” was a classic cautious Timesian understatement. The data-sharing would be entirely illegal. The IRS operates on the basic principle that collecting tax revenue is an independent government activity, in which taxpayers are expected to be honest with the government about how much money they made, and in exchange for that honesty, the government is supposed to use that information to collect taxes and not to do anything else with it. Illegal gamblers are required to report the money they won, because they owe taxes on that income; law enforcement agencies are forbidden to search tax returns to figure out who the illegal gamblers might be. 

[…]

Using tax records to hunt down migrants is not just a violation of some specific data-management laws of the IRS. It’s a rejection of the entire concept of lawful government. It means that the United States can’t be trusted to honor its established everyday obligations to the people here.