Some activists are questioning whether the federal government can accurately verify a tax program for facilities that store planet-warming gases.

Lucrative new tax subsidies for companies that catch the planet-warming gas carbon dioxide and store it deep underground were one of the few aspects of President Biden’s 2022 climate legislation that the oil industry embraced.

The potential tax benefits spurred the industry, one of the largest contributors to the current climate crisis, to invest billions of dollars in the process, called carbon capture and sequestration.

Now some Democratic lawmakers, tax watchdogs and climate activists are raising concerns that the Internal Revenue Service, tasked with verifying fossil-fuel industry claims on stored carbon, lacks adequate safeguards to ensure that no companies are taking more taxpayer dollars than they qualify for. And they are equally frustrated that the I.R.S. and the Environmental Protection Agency rely on the companies’ own reported data.

The agencies do not “go out

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