WASHINGTON-Dozens of Internal Revenue Service employees improperly viewed the tax records of celebrities, government officials and business leaders from 2022 through 2025, according to an inspector general's report released on Friday.

Unauthorized access is illegal, even if employees don't disclose tax information outside the government, and it can be punished through criminal prosecution or employee discipline. The inspector general sent the cases to its investigation division for further review. The report warned that the IRS doesn't have effective ways to prevent employees from peeking at celebrities' tax records or detect that access after it happens.

The report's recommendations include studying technologies to implement preventive controls and working toward ensuring that taxpayers are notified of unauthorized access.

The unauthorized access happened after the most damaging leak of taxpayer information in the agency's history, which had prompted a tightening of internal defenses. Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor, provided tax records of President Trump and thousands of wealthy Americans to news organizations.

The extent of that breach became clear in June 2021 and the fact that it came from inside the IRS has been known since Littlejohn's arrest in September 2023. (He is currently in federal prison and is scheduled to be released next year.)

Since the Littlejohn leak, IRS executives have said they have been tightening security controls.

According to Friday's report, most queries of IRS computer systems require employees to know a person's Social Security number. But some command codes require only a last name, and that approach can bypass IRS detection, the report said. The inspector general identified 52 employees accessing records of 30 taxpayers.

The IRS has more than 70,000 employees, who receive training about unauthorized access and overwhelmingly follow the law. The report identified 86 suspicious access incidents out of nearly six million queries. It covered a four-year period in which the agency expanded under the Biden administration, shrank under the Trump administration and had a carousel of top leaders.

Agency executives largely agreed with the inspector general's recommendations.

"The IRS remains firmly committed to safeguarding taxpayer information," the agency said in a statement, adding that it is continuously strengthening its program against unauthorized access in ways that are "designed to protect taxpayer privacy and maintain public trust."