The House Judiciary Committee has revealed that the IRS leaked the tax information of over 405,000 Americans—far more than the agency previously admitted.
The culprit? Former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, who is already serving time for illegally disclosing President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
But the latest revelations show the damage was far more extensive than the Biden administration initially acknowledged.
In a letter dated February 14 and made public on February 25, Acting IRS Commissioner Douglas W. O’Donnell confirmed that 405,427 taxpayers were affected by the leak—nearly six times more than the “more than 70,000” figure the IRS had originally claimed. The information came from a data analysis conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
The House Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Jim Jordan, has been investigating the leak since last year. It accuses the Biden administration’s IRS of misleading the public about the scale of the breach.
“New disclosure reveals that the Biden IRS leaked taxpayer information of over 405,000 Americans — including President Trump’s,” the committee posted on X. “We found out that it’s actually over 405,000 taxpayers! This is a MASSIVE scandal.”
Littlejohn, who worked as a contractor for the IRS in 2019 and 2020, was sentenced last year to five years in prison for unlawfully disclosing Trump’s tax records and other confidential information to the media. He claimed at his sentencing that he acted out of a “sincere and misguided belief” that he was serving the public interest, despite systematically violating the privacy of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers.
While the IRS has said it has since improved its data security, the admission of such a massive breach raises serious concerns about the agency’s ability—or willingness—to protect sensitive taxpayer information.
The agency has mailed notifications to affected individuals and businesses, stating that 89% of those impacted were business entities. However, it remains unclear exactly what details were exposed.
The IRS has acknowledged its failure to prevent Littlejohn’s actions, previously stating that it “failed to prevent Mr. Littlejohn’s criminal conduct and unlawful disclosure” of confidential tax data. But the scope of the breach has fueled fresh criticism, particularly as it confirms Republican suspicions that the Biden administration’s IRS significantly downplayed the incident.
Littlejohn is currently serving his sentence at the Marion Federal Correctional Institution in Illinois, with a scheduled release date of July 13, 2028.
Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee continues to investigate the full extent of the leak. It aims to find out whether additional failures within the IRS contributed to the exposure of hundreds of thousands of Americans’ private financial records.