The ACLU has sued Weld County authorities, claiming they violated the privacy of thousands of people by seizing files from a tax service during an identity-theft crackdown.
The Weld County Sheriff’s Office took 4,900 tax files from Amalia’s Translation and Tax Service in Greeley in October.
Investigators said the tax service was known among illegal immigrants as a place to go to file for tax refunds.
“The search violated the privacy rights of thousands of innocent taxpayers who are not suspected of any wrongdoing,” said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “If the sheriff and the district attorney can comb through all the many thousands of records of a tax preparer on the theory that some of the clients are doing something wrong, then none of our private information is safe.”
Weld County Sheriff John Cooke and 19th Judicial District Attorney Ken Buck are named in the suit, filed Monday in district court.
Buck said confidential tax information gathered by the Sheriff’s Office will be kept secret.
“We suspect that 1,300 illegal immigrants are committing ID theft and criminal impersonation, and we will continue to work the case,” Buck said.
Cooke called the lawsuit “frivolous and ridiculous. We had information that people were committing crimes, and we got a search warrant and went and got them.”
Thirty-nine arrests have been made in the case so far, and more than 70 warrants remain outstanding.
Authorities raided Amalia’s after one illegal immigrant told them the tax service prepared his taxes for several years by getting an IRS individual taxpayer ID number and using that, instead of his fake Social Security number, to file the return.
