By Jacob Bogage
WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is debating requiring taxpayers to disclose their citizenship status on next year’s tax forms, according to three people familiar with the situation, as the Trump administration intensifies attempts to link federal agencies to its sprawling immigration enforcement and anti-fraud drive.
IRS officials are considering two versions of Form 1040, the primary paperwork individuals use to report earnings and claim tax benefits, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.
The first version contains minor updates to reflect changes in tax laws. The second includes those updates and a check-box labeled: “Check this box if you are a non-U.S. citizen or have dual citizenship.”
Representatives from the Treasury Department – the IRS’s parent agency – declined to comment on Friday.
Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are required to file taxes and use the same IRS forms as tax filers with citizenship. Paying taxes has long been seen as a key factor for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status.
“It’s just an effort to once again terrorize people with certain immigration statuses, and it’s another step of turning the IRS into an agency that collaborates with immigration authorities rather than being an agency that enforces and administers the tax laws,” said Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, an advocacy and low-income tax assistance organization.
The Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security spent much of 2025 attempting to collaborate, sharing confidential taxpayer data with immigration officials to assist in the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.
Olson’s organization filed a lawsuit, and a federal judge in November blocked the IRS from disclosing that data. The federal government has appealed the ruling.
The IRS in February admitted to the court that it had erroneously shared the data of more than 42,000 taxpayers with DHS.
Disclosing a taxpayer’s personal information — including a name or address — outside of narrow legal exceptions carries stiff penalties, including jail time. President Donald Trump recently dropped a lawsuit against the IRS seeking $10 billion in damages after a tax agency contractor leaked his tax returns to media outlets. The contractor, Charles Littlejohn, is serving a five-year prison sentence.
In exchange for dropping the suit, the Justice Department created a nearly $1.8 billion fund to pay supposed victims of “government weaponization.” As part of the settlement, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an agreement permanently barring the IRS from pursuing tax claims against Trump, his family or his businesses.
The Trump administration has sought to aggressively police government benefits awarded to non-citizens. Federal law already prohibits undocumented immigrants from many entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other benefits covering education and housing. Non-citizens, though, pay into those programs through income, payroll and sales taxes.Â
Tax preparers nationwide reported encountering clients frightened to file taxes in 2025 due to the IRS’s collaboration with immigration enforcement. That fear has fiscal consequences for the U.S. government. The Yale Budget Lab estimated lower tax compliance rates among immigrant communities could lead to a $313 billion loss in federal revenue over the next decade.
The IRS is considering other methods of determining a taxpayer’s citizenship status. Non-citizens can file taxes using a nine-digit “individual tax identification number” in place of a Social Security number. Tax officials have discussed differentiating codes to denote a filer’s immigration status, the people said. The New York Times first reported those deliberations.
(Reporting by Jacob Bogage; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Rosalba O’Brien and Nick Zieminski)
