I.R.S. Said To Flout Orders To Yield Data About Audits

WASHINGTON — A tax research group went to court Monday, arguing that the Internal Revenue Service was not complying with federal court orders to release data on its audit practices.

A researcher, Prof. Susan B. Long of the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, said the I.R.S. was “flouting three federal court orders” to turn over detailed data on individual and corporate audits.

She asked Judge Marsha J. Pechman of United States District Court in Seattle to require the agency to certify in writing that the data it provides complies with a 1976 court order as well as two recent ones. The agency complied with the court order until four years ago, when it said in a letter that no such order existed, a position it dropped once Professor Long provided a copy of it.

Professor Long gave the judge dozens of pages of recent I.R.S. documents showing that instead of providing data in electronic database format as the court ordered, it released some in Microsoft Word and printed out other data on paper that was mailed, unsorted, in boxes with gaps in sequentially numbered pages.

In one document, the total numbers of corporate and individual audits under review and the total amounts of tax in dispute were blacked out. The court orders specify that no such editing is allowed, said David Burnham, co-director with Professor Long of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which gathers government data and posts it on the Internet along with its analyses of the effectiveness of half a dozen federal agencies.

The I.R.S. said it was working to provide the data “in a form consistent with the agency’s legal obligation to protect the privacy of taxpayers.” It said that efforts to negotiate with Professor Long regarding which data she should get had been unsuccessful, but that it continued to provide her with nine reports each month.

In a separate case, Tax Analysts, the nonprofit publisher of Tax Notes magazine, said Monday that it was negotiating with the I.R.S. to make public all e-mail messages in which tax auditors in the field were given advice on how to apply the law. Only a small number of the messages have been released.

Tax Analysts went to court for the e-mail messages earlier, after the I.R.S. had asserted that any advice that required less than two hours to research and provide was not subject to disclosure.

“We won a unanimous court of appeals decision that they can’t hide this stuff,” Tax Analysts’ president, Christopher Bergin, said, “but instead of complying with the order to produce it, they are playing games.”

In January 2007, the I.R.S. adopted a new argument for withholding some data on how it resolves disputes between taxpayers and auditors. The agency said some data covered by the 1976 court order is part of the “deliberative process,” making it exempt from disclosure rules under the Freedom of Information Act.

Professor Long, in a sworn statement, told Judge Pechman that the agency delayed providing paper copies of audit statistics for more than two months because of what she called an “alleged photocopier breakdown.”

And Mr. Burnham said, “Who knew that the entire I.R.S. had only a single photocopier, and when it breaks down, everything stops?”

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