WASHINGTON — A 25-year-old staffer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is expected to imminently gain access to the IRS’s sensitive tax database as fraud becomes a major focus of the deficit-cutting initiative, The Post has confirmed.
Software engineer Gavin Kliger will gain credentials to the system that tracks tax returns and information about individuals as DOGE aggressively slashes spending across the federal bureaucracy.
“Waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long. It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement first reported by CNN.
“DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard earned tax dollars on.”
It’s unclear what exactly Kliger will be looking into by using the database — as millions of Americans prepare to submit their annual returns, due by April 15.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said Monday afternoon that part of the DOGE review would be focused on locating fraud by foreigners who file bogus returns to steal from the government.
“There’s a massive amount of fraud in this country. You have, for example, foreign fraud rings — these are foreign nationals who come into the United States — they use fake Social Security numbers, they use fake identities to steal billions in taxpayer benefits,” Miller said on Fox News.
“There’s no way to know until DOGE gains full access exactly how much money we’re talking about, but over a 10-year normal budget window, you could be talking about saving over $1 trillion by clamping down on massive fraud in our tax and entitlement systems, including, again, those carried out by organized fraud and theft rings.”
Miller added that it was “very important” to note that “DOGE are subordinate staffers of the federal government — they’re political appointees just like me.”
Meanwhile, DC US District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Friday refused a request from 14 Democrat-led states to block DOGE staffers from accessing federal databases, saying the broad request would “essentially bring government to a halt.”
Core members of Musk’s team are now classified as federal officials, with some of them serving, like the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, as unpaid special government employees.
Kliger graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 2020 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, as well as 3.95 grade point average, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He previously worked as an intern at Twitter, before Musk’s 2022 takeover and rebranding of the social media platform, and as a software engineer at the AI firm Databricks.
In a since-deleted Substack post, Kliger claimed he gave up “millions of dollars, prestige, and a life of comfort” in Silicon Valley to correct the “institutional failure” and “systemic corruption” in Washington.
Currently, he’s listed as a senior adviser to the director for technology and delivery at the US Office of Personnel Management.
In addition to fraudulent outflows, the IRS estimates that it reaps significantly less each year than is owed — about $540 billion, or more than a quarter of the annual federal deficit.
That’s on top of entitlement fraud impacting the Social Security system, with Musk claiming that initial inquiries have discovered payments to illegal immigrants and implausibly old retirees. The scale of those issues remains murky.
Medicare fraud, which has not yet emerged as a major focus in public disclosures, reportedly costs the feds additional billions.
With access to IRS files, it’s possible DOGE will look into how much money flows to Democratic priorities, such as green-energy tax breaks, and scrutinize write-offs that President Trump has asked Congress to repeal in a pending tax bill, including the carried-interest loophole and perks for sports team owners.
Trump wants to eliminate those benefits to finance his campaign pledge to abolish taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits, but currently only rough estimates exist for their cost.
Individual taxpayer information cannot legally be released except under narrowly defined circumstances, such as through a vote of the tax-governing House Ways & Means Committee.
Trump, 78, revealed last week that DOGE now comprises about 100 people after launching in late January with “12 geniuses.”
“They’ll ask questions and they’ll see immediately, if somebody gets tongue-tied, that they’re either crooked or don’t know what they’re doing,” the president said earlier this month.
Musk, 53, has said he hopes to halve the federal deficit by trimming $1 trillion in spending.
DOGE, which Musk says he plans to lead for about four months, already has moved to gut the USAID foreign-aid agency, to begin the process of dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and to all but eliminate the Education Department.
On Friday, the team said that it discovered $1.9 billion in “misplaced” and unneeded Department of Housing and Urban Development funds and canceled $373 million in Education Department grants for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training sessions.
Also last week, DOGE axed $900 million in Education Department grants for tracking academic progress — after halting disbursements by the $50 billion-a-year USAID and beginning the process of dismissing most of its 10,000 employees.
The DOGE involvement in the IRS database could be one of its most sensitive operations to date, as any action to toughen enforcement on ordinary taxpayers could spur political backlash.
Republicans, including Trump, fiercely opposed former President Joe Biden’s $80 billion boost in IRS funding in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, arguing it could unleash up to 87,000 new IRS agents on the lives and transactions of middle-class Americans.
Although much of the tax evasion and avoidance that occurs happens among the wealthy, experts say that well-financed individuals are unappealing targets for enforcers because they have the resources to drag out disagreements through legal processes.
Biden himself, for example, allegedly underpaid the feds by up to $500,000 by routing speaking-fee income through what’s known as an “S Corporation” in 2017 and 2018, allowing him to dodge Medicare taxes by lowballing the amount of that income that counted as pay as opposed to business profits.
Former first son Hunter Biden, meanwhile, faced years of criminal investigation for allegedly failing to pay millions in taxes on foreign income and for a range of infractions — including listing a $10,000 sex club membership and a $3,852 Lamborghini rental as business expenses.
Hunter was offered a probation-only plea deal in June 2023 — but only after IRS whistleblowers claimed the almost five-year probe was being slow-walked, allowing some charges to lapse.
After that deal collapsed over Hunter’s demand for even broader immunity for prior conduct, he decided to plead guilty again last year to $1.4 million in tax fraud and was later pardoned by his father.
