I’ve figured out something important about the IRS, Gavin said. He paused for effect.

Oh no, thought Kathleen.

Every agency has a superpower, said Gavin. The IRS’s superpower is data.

Everyone in the agency knew that its data was valuable. That was the reason for the strict laws that prevented it from being exploited for profit or political gain. “He said this in a way that he expected everyone to clap when he was done,” said Kathleen.

“No one said a word.” The people around the table – a group that included a woman who had worked at the IRS for 54 years, or 53 years and 50 weeks longer than Gavin Kliger – looked down, or away. Kathleen felt embarrassed for Gavin Kliger. But now it was clear what the meeting was about. Gavin wanted, in his words, “to explore how we can share our data with other agencies”.

…

And so, roughly two weeks later, on Thursday, 27 March, she was caught completely off guard by an email chain that popped up on her screen. At the bottom was its origin: a note from Melanie, forwarding some document from the IRS legal department, along with what sounded like an innocuous request. “Kathleen, could you help facilitate I won’t be able to join today?” it read, without explaining what she was meant to facilitate or why Melanie wouldn’t be able to join. Scrolling through, Kathleen couldn’t find the document but did see lots of bewildered replies from others who had been included – What is this about? Happy to help but can you tell us what this is?

She called the two young lawyers in the IRS legal office who had authored the document referred to in the chain that had somehow gone missing. They explained that the thing Melanie wanted Kathleen to facilitate was a memorandum of understanding for the IRS to share taxpayer data with DHS. Kathleen was knocked sideways. “I thought that it had been stopped,” she said. “I thought Melanie had been caught with her pants down.” The young lawyers now told her that not only had it not been stopped: they’d been working on it since the end of February. “They told me that they were sorry but Melanie had told them to do it and not to tell me or their boss,” said Kathleen.

…

After the call, Julie, the IRS privacy lawyer, came straight to her office. Julie was usually ice-calm – someone who kept her wits about her. She hadn’t a trace of drama in her. But now Julie was not calm. Kathleen, after that call I’m not working on this thing, she said. I’m not coming in tomorrow. I might not come in Monday. I might not come in ever again.

“I don’t usually deal with life or death stuff,” said Kathleen. “But this was life or death stuff. At that moment I knew I had to quit. Either that or I’m going to get fired, because I can’t facilitate something that will break the law and is going to hurt people. We all have boundaries. That was my boundary.”