Spying Allegations Aside, Head of IRS and SSA Says Your Info is Safe with Him

By Jean Marbella
Baltimore Sun
(TNS)

Frank J. Bisignano, who heads both the IRS and Social Security Administration, dismissed accusations in a recent Wall Street Journal article that he spied on fellow executives during his previous financial career.

Your personal financial data, he said Thursday, is safe with him.

“We have the best cybersecurity right now that we’ve ever had at Social Security and we’ve the best risk management profile that we’ve ever had,” Bisignano told The Baltimore Sun. “So I think Americans should feel it’s in the best hands under President Trump’s leadership.”

Bisignano, speaking before a taping of “The Armstrong Williams Show,” hosted by Armstrong Williams, the co-owner of The Sun, dismissed the allegations in The Journal article earlier this week that while co-chief operating officer of JPMorgan Chase he had accessed emails of rival executives and a draft of a confidential complaint from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Additionally, The Journal said, Bisignano sought to track employees’ computer keystrokes. The Journal noted that none of the allegations were known to involve improper access to customer information.

While an attorney for Bisignano denied the allegations to The Journal, the newspaper said the bank’s legal department found digital traces of the spying, including access to email, after he left the bank.

Bisignano said The Journal article was based on unnamed sources.

“I think it was really a story about Seinfeld,” he said of the article, “a story about nothing.”

A Wall Street Journal spokesperson said in an emailed statement: “Our reporting is accurate, thoroughly vetted, and backed by multiple knowledgeable sources. We stand behind the story.”

Bisignano left JPMorgan in 2013 to become CEO of First Data, a payment processing company, which later merged with Fiserv. He had a long career on Wall Street, including a stint at Citigroup during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, before Trump nominated him to head the Social Security Administration.

Bisignano was confirmed on a party-line vote by the Senate in May 2025. In October, he was appointed to the newly created job of IRS CEO, keeping the Social Security post as well. More recently, he was put in charge of Trump Accounts, tax-deferred retirement funds that parents can open for their newborns.

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On behalf of the IRS, Bisignano signed a controversial settlement of a lawsuit Trump had filed against the agency over a 2019 leak of his tax returns. The settlement drew outrage for creating a fund to pay those who allegedly were prosecuted for political reasons, viewed as potentially including the president’s supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A provision added to the agreement ordered a halt to pending audits of Trump, his family and his business as well as future audits of already filed returns.

A federal judge rebuked the settlement and the suit itself for pitting Trump, as chief executive, against an executive branch agency that he controls. In an order issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams wrote that the suit was filed “to provide some legitimacy” to an agreement giving Trump and his affiliates immunity, and earmarking “billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”