Comment by snowwrestler

Congress is in charge of the IRS, and the president is charged with operating it.

Since the president and members of Congress are not posted up in there 24/7, the IRS has created internal controls and procedures so that when the president or Congress asks for a report, the IRS can give them an accurate one. It’s these controls that people are thinking of. The article has an example:

> Political officials do not have access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. The IRS’s commissioner, national taxpayer advocate and even senior officials in the office of the chief information officer, do not have IDRS access either.

“Do not have access” in this case means they have made internal rules, essentially denying themselves access, in order to better document that they are doing what Congress wants them to do.

This is true in many agencies, and one of the concerns with DOGE is that they seem to be trying to circumvent these controls. That may impair the ability of an agency to meet their legislative mandate (e.g. protecting taxpayer privacy), and also impair the agency’s ability to even document what they are doing.

So the answer to “what oversight” is that Congress ultimately has the power of oversight, and the executive branch has the responsibility to operate in such a way that they can accurately satisfy requests from Congress.