TRACFed New BLS Subscription

Statistics from thousands of pages of previously unpublished federal enforcement agency documents are available online to Brooklyn Law School Library users, thanks to a new subscription to TRACFED from Syracuse University. The service allows users to access and analyze online TRAC databases and provides information on federal prosecutions and tax audits from the FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and more than 20 other federal agencies. The site provides access to cases referred to federal prosecutors but not prosecuted, not usually available. A researcher can look up the number of drug-related cases prosecuted by all of the federal agencies in a given area and run a comparison with the rest of the nation. Results come back as tables.

Operating out of Syracuse University, TRAC files hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests each year and follows up on requests that have been stalled or denied. After acquiring documents, the Syracuse University statisticians render them understandable, sometimes by writing separate programs to decipher particularly cryptic codes. The site has been around for some time and was reviewed in the 2002 LLRX article Features - A Review of TRACFed: Lawyers Strike Gold Mining Government Data.

Prior to April 15 of this year, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) posted updates to much of its data on the Internal Revenue Service. Included in this edition are the following features all of which can be reached from TRAC's IRS Data Tools and Applications page.

• Audits - two applications graphically display changes in the number of field
and correspondence audits, both individual and corporate, for fiscal years 1992
through 2010.
• Graphical Highlights - national enforcement trends for corporate and individual audits along with information about levies, liens and
seizure activities.
• Criminal Enforcement - the latest figures from the Department of Justice on the criminal enforcement of cases referred by the IRS, presented with detailed maps, ranking tables, and individual district tables for the United States and each of 90 federal judicial districts.
• U.S. Code - an updated list of the most frequently cited lead charges that eventually led to formal charges or convictions.
• TRACFED - expanded information and exclusive data analysis tools are available on TRAC's newly expanded subscription site.