Millions of Americans are preparing to file their taxes by the April 15 deadline.
Meanwhile, there is something going on at the IRS.
The IRS keeps detailed financial information about every taxpayer in the country,
every business, every nonprofit.
That information all lives in a highly guarded internal system,
and Elon Musk's US DOGE Service is trying to get access to it from the newsroom of the Washington Post.
This is Post Reports.
I'm Martine powers.
It's Tuesday, February 18th.
Today, Doge is targeting the Internal Revenue Service.
My colleague Jacob Bogage is an economics correspondent for the Post,
and he'll explain what this news could mean for millions of American taxpayers and their sensitive data.
Okay, so, Jacob,
I want you to start by explaining a little bit more about this database that DOGE is hoping to access.
Like, what is it?
When we talk about IRS databases, let's reset a little bit.
We're not talking about one database.
We're talking about 60 databases.
And they all feed into this one system called the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or idrs.
The purpose of that is so that when I call the IRS with a question about my tax return or my business's taxes,