It is every parent’s worst nightmare. A child goes missing. Law enforcement officers and family members race against the clock to find the child before it is too late. The more time it takes to find the child, the chances of that child returning home unharmed go down.

As a former prosecutor, I understand that law enforcement officers need every resource available to them in order to do their job of finding and returning missing children. Time is precious, and the faster law enforcement officers can locate the child, the better the likelihood that the child can be returned to family safe from harm.

Each year, nearly 200,000 children are abducted by a family member. According to an Inspector General study of 1,700 Social Security numbers for missing children and their alleged abductors, the IRS had new addresses on file in more than a third of the cases. These new addresses are potentially critical information for law enforcement, and it makes no sense that this information is sitting unused in government files that law enforcement agencies can’t access to help in recovery efforts.

To make it easier to recover missing children, I worked with Sen. Mike Enzi, a Republican from Wyoming, and Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, along with Rep. Erik Paulsen of Minnesota, to pass the Recovering Missing Children Act. Our bipartisan legislation gives law enforcement officers important tools to solve some of these heartbreaking cases by allowing the IRS to disclose tax records to state and local law enforcement agencies to assist in the investigation of missing or exploited children.

This legislation will allow for information sharing between federal, state and local law enforcement officers who are directly involved in investigating and prosecuting cases related to missing and exploited children.

We need to give law enforcement agencies every resource available to help find missing children, but we also need to protect taxpayer privacy. That is why our bill only permits the disclosure of relevant tax return information for the purpose of aiding criminal investigations and prosecutions. The transfer of taxpayer information would occur only if strict standards for confidentiality and protection of the information from unauthorized use is observed by the state and local agencies.

In past missing children cases, the IRS has known the location of a child but was barred from sharing this information with local law enforcement. Despite looking everywhere and following up on every lead to find these children, the efforts of local police officers were diminished because they did not have access to new information in the government’s possession that could have led to the children’s return.

This won’t happen anymore. Our legislation was signed into law in July. Now, law enforcement officers can do their jobs more effectively with better information and help bring missing children home before it is too late.

Amy Klobuchar represents Minnesota in the U.S. Senate. She wrote this at the invitation of the News Tribune Opinion page.