Susan Long, a professor at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, recently filed a lawsuit against the IRS for violating court orders.

The United States District Court in Seattle issued an order in 1976 that the IRS provide Long and her husband, Philip, with data from individual and corporate audits. Initially obtained for her graduate thesis while at the University of Washington, the court order required that all data from the IRS be sent to Long for research purposes, she said.

Currently, Long uses data from individual and corporate audits given to her by the IRS to provide information on the federal government for the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

But starting this year, the IRS stopped sending Long audits, which prompted her to file a lawsuit on Feb. 11 against the IRS for violating the court orders she already obtained.

‘I gained a court order that said not only did they have to release it back then, but that they had to continue to do that whenever I asked for it,’ Long said.

The government agency complied with the court orders for more than 30 years until the past three, when it began distorting pages of information or leaving out entire portions of collected data. This was violating the agreement that required that all the data sent to Long be uncensored, unless the IRS obtained consent from the judge to conceal pieces of data.

‘Basically they ignore the request, there are a whole series of requests that have been pending for three years,’ Long said. ‘That’s a violation not only of the court order but of the Freedom of Information Act.’

Aside from teaching managerial statistics, Long is also the co-director of the TRAC, which is a joint center of the Whitman and S.I. Newhouse Public Communications schools.

TRAC, co-directed by David Burnham, uses the data given to Long by the IRS to research the federal government’s enforcement of taxes, spending, and staffing and then makes it more accessible to the public through the Web. Anyone can obtain this information at trac.syr.edu.

‘The point of TRAC is to get data out of the government so that reporters, public interest groups, universities or even the government itself can see what the government is actually doing and not doing,’ Burnham said.

The TRAC research offers a surveillance of the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

News services like CNN, the Associated Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post subscribe to the TRAC warehouse Web site for information on the program’s research.

Long’s concern is not only that information she needs for research is being withheld, but also that a government agency is violating the law by refusing information to the public.

‘It’s really a case of the top officials at the IRS thinking that they are above the law,’ Long said. ‘Do you really want a tax agency that has enormous powers, it needs powers to collect taxes, but do you really want a tax agency that feels they’re above the law?’

Sophomore finance major Adam Mohamed said students in the Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises program use data from the Census Bureau and the IRS in order to make business plans for their final projects.

‘Withholding this information is counterproductive and actually unethical,’ Mohamed said. ‘We live in a free society and should be allowed access to government information when we want, especially if it serves no threat internationally. It’s a violation of honesty because omission is essentially the same as lying to the public.’

[email protected]

Published on March 4, 2008 at 12:00 pm