Under the Biden administration, the Internal Revenue Service wants to “improve” your taxpayer experience by requiring your biometric information. Beginning in June, if you want to receive your taxpayer information, then you will have to submit a “selfie” through a private contractor for facial recognition.
This is an agency that we’ve already gone to court over after they were caught targeting conservatives, and we put a court order into place to forbid this practice. This is also an agency that still uses fax machines to communicate instead of more modern methods like email. Not to mention, the IRS had at the end of last filing season more than 35 million total unprocessed returns. How could they handle this technology? The IRS is the last agency that the American people would want to have this confidential biometric information.
There has already been extreme pushback from both sides of the aisle like we’ve never seen before. Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu expressed his concern: “This is a very, very bad idea by the IRS. It will further weaken Americans’ privacy…. The IRS needs to reverse this Big Brother tactic, now.”
Another Democratic senator echoed this concern. Sen. Ron Wyden tweeted: “I’m very disturbed that Americans may have to submit to a facial recognition system, wait on hold for hours, or both, to access personal data on the IRS website. While e-filing returns remain unaffected, I’m pushing the IRS for greater transparency on this plan.”
In an interview on Fox, Republican Sen. Rick Scott explained the dangers of this: “I’ve heard from so many people in my state that said, oh I am supposed to get a refund, but I had to get on there, I had to give … facial recognition. This is Big Brother. By the way, this is the same IRS that got hacked a few years ago and millions of millions of millions of people’s personal data was released. No. 1, the government … shouldn’t be doing this. No. 2, you know that it’s going to get hacked. There is no confidentiality. I’m surprised … Biden probably has a Chinese company doing it.”
American Center for Law and Justice Senior Adviser for National Security and Foreign Policy and former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell explained the hypocrisy by the Biden administration for this move:
Look, I think the headline is that the Biden administration is admitting that IDs are important for security. Think about that. Where else do we need IDs? Maybe the voting booth, maybe elections.
But when the Biden team is telling Americans that you have to have facial recognition in order to deal with the IRS or get pertinent information from the IRS because it is the only secure way, why is the Biden administration against showing an ID in order to vote?
The other problem with this is, I just don’t see this as a problem for the IRS that people are trying to break into the system and pretend they are somebody else in order to pay somebody else’s taxes? … The IRS is so concerned that other people want to pay my taxes and pretend to be me … That is one agency that I’d say pretend to be Ric Grenell and take over and pay my taxes.
Ric added how important the ACLJ is in this fight:
The dirty little secret is that everybody outside of Washington knows that this entire city, the entire government, is totally inconsistent. They will say anything. Only in Washington, D.C., do things make sense; to the rest of us it doesn’t make sense. . . .
I am really struck with how important it is to give and support the ACLJ. Because I can tell you, I have been a part of inside the government, and at the U.N., and I have been a part of big multilateral institutions, and without having outside organizations that are free of government involvement, without having organizations like the ACLJ to demand and push and use the law so effectively, like we do, we just don’t have accountability on the government.
You can’t rely on our senators and Congress people to hold the government accountable any longer. If you want to take action, if you are tired of what makes sense in Washington doesn’t make sense to the rest of the world, I really say support the ACLJ. Because we have a team that just doesn’t need approval from the government. We just go after it. We point out the hypocrisy. We use the media. And that pressure of using the law, and the legal angles and the media angles works.
And because of the support of our ACLJ members, our office of government accountability is already taking action. The IRS out of all agencies cannot be trusted with our biometric data, and we will fight in court and in Congress to make sure that does not happen.
Today’s full Sekulow broadcast is complete with even more analysis of the IRS attempting to require facial recognition to access your basic tax information. {eoa}
This article originally appeared ataclj.org
Jay Sekulow is chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, one of the most prestigious law firms in the country.
