I reported earlier, here, Syracuse Professor Long's suit against the IRS for failure to provide statistical information as required in a prior judgment. The Western District of Washington has now upheld the original 1976 decision and ordered the IRS to provide extensive statistical information to Professor Long within 14 days. See the district court's order. The order, along with TRAC's motion and a TRAC release on Judge Pechman's decision, are available at the TRAC website, here.
The TRAC release summarizes and quotes the Judge's order as follows:
The court rejected the IRS's argument that the production of statistical data would violate a statute prohibiting public release of tax return information about individual taxpayers, because there was no evidence that the statistics could be used to identify any taxpayer. The ruling stated that, "[b]ecause Ms. Long seeks to disseminate the information sought in this proceeding to the public, there would be a public benefit from disclosure of the records sought." It also found that, "Ms. Long's interest in this matter stretches back 30 years and has both public interest and scholarly components." Id.
It is interesting that the IRS pursued this secretive approach on release of statistical information about its own audit and enforcement efforts while at the same time proposing regulations that further facilitate tax return preparers' ability to profit from commercial use of private tax return information. See the proposed regulations, Notice 2005-93 (with the proposed consent and warning requirements), this article and this prior posting on A Taxing Matter. New York Senator Schumer has called on the IRS to rescind its plan for permitting tax return preparers more flexibility in commercialization of taxpayer data with taxpayer consent. See this story. In response to various critical analyses of the proposed regulations, the IRS website, here, defends the regulations as adequately safeguarding taxpayer information.
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