IRS Employees Still Had Access To TikTok Despite Government Ban, Watchdog Finds
Jason Cohen on December 21, 2023
Over 2,000 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) devices had access to TikTok despite a government ban, the Treasury Inspector General For Tax Administration (TIGTA) disclosed in a report published on Monday.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) banned TikTok for federal government devices in February, according to White House documents. The IRS’s Criminal Investigation (CI) unit failed to enforce the ban as of August 2023 and had not asked for an exemption to it, according to the TIGTA report.
“The IRS does not comply with the OMB’s mandate as computers and mobile devices assigned to CI employees continue to have the functionality to access TikTok and other related websites,” the report states. “For example, TIGTA identified more than 2,800 mobile devices used by CI that could access TikTok’s website and approximately 900 CI employees that had the ability to get access to TikTok’s website via computers assigned to CI. As of August 2023, CI has yet to request the required exception from the Department of Treasury nor has it taken steps to block access to TikTok on computers and mobile devices assigned to its personnel.”
The IRS did not agree to TIGTA’s guidance to prohibit TikTok access on the thousands of CI Devices, opting to pursue exceptions instead, according to the report. “IRS management disagreed with this recommendation and instead is establishing an internal process to adjudicate limited exceptions,” it states.
States including Montana and Nevada have also banned TikTok from government devices.
TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance has an internal Chinese Communist Party committee and was founded by an individual who affirmed ByteDance is a “mouthpiece” for the CCP, according to a 2020 Justice Department legal filing.
ByteDance employees allegedly utilized TikTok information to surveil American journalists reporting on the app in 2022, Forbes reported.
The IRS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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