Case Detail
| Case Title | WADE v. INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| District | District of Columbia | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| City | Washington, DC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Case Number | 1:2010cv00065 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Filed | 2010-01-14 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Date Closed | 2011-03-23 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Judge | Judge Rosemary M. Collyer | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Plaintiff | JACK W. WADE, JR. owner/ operator of National Tax Services, Inc. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Plaintiff | NATIONAL TAX SERVICES, INC. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Defendant | INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Documents | Docket Complaint Complaint attachment 1 Opinion/Order [22] FOIA Project Annotation: Judge Rosemary Collyer has ruled that "secondary" phone numbers in an IRS database of Enrolled Agents, who are tax practitioners allowed to appear before the agency in administrative proceedings, are synonymous with "home" phone numbers and were correctly withheld under Exemption 6 (invasion of privacy) by the agency. Although the agency had provided the list of Enrolled Agents in the past, when the list was converted from the previous Enrolled Practitioner Program System database to the new E-trak database, fields that had previously contained work and home phone numbers were converted to "primary" and "secondary" phone number fields. To protect the privacy of home phone numbers, the IRS released the new list to Jack Wade, president of National Tax Services, a company that provides mailing lists to tax professionals, but withheld the phone numbers. Collyer examined the balance between the public interest in disclosure and the personal interest in privacy. She noted that "the disclosure of home phone numbers of Enrolled Agents here might, as Plaintiffs argue, help the public at large access greater contact information for Enrolled Agents who complete public tax returns, 'but it would not appreciably further "the citizens" right to be informed about what their government is up to.' Governmental transparency is not affected by such a disclosure, and to whatever degree it might be, the disclosure of the 'primary' phone numbers and addresses of the Enrolled Agents suffices to accommodate the de minimis public interest." Relying on the Supreme Court's decision in Dept of Defense v. Federal Labor Relations Authority, 510 U.S. 487 (1994), she then explained that "just as the home addresses of individuals in Federal Labor Relations Authority constituted private information the disclosure of which was deemed to be an unwarranted invasion of privacy protected by Exemption 6, the disclosure of the Enrolled Agents' home phone numbers similarly would be an unwarranted invasion of privacy protected by Exemption 6." Wade argued that the secondary phone number was not necessarily a home phone number. He indicated that he had contacted 73 Enrolled Agents using their primary work numbers and found that a number of them were actually home numbers. Collyer rejected this experiment, pointing out that "there are many reasons why an Enrolled Agent might have a residential address or have a home or cell phone number as his 'primary' number, such as working out of a residential neighborhood, a home, or using a cell phone for work. But most importantly, the Enrolled Agents identified a number as their 'home' phone number in the EPPS database, and should be afforded the privacy attendant to that. The IRS has legitimately determined that any 'home' phone number, as identified by the Enrolled Agents, constitutes private information the disclosure of which would be an unwarranted invasion of privacy protected by Exemption 6."
Issues: Exemption 6 - Invasion of privacy | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| User-contributed Documents | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Docket Events (Hide) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
