Menu
Tax Notes logo

Illinois Court Orders DOR to Release Audit Manual

Posted on Dec. 27, 2019

A circuit court has ordered the Illinois Department of Revenue to provide its audit manual to Tax Analysts after the department denied the company's Freedom of Information Act requests.

Associate Judge Jack Davis Jr. of Sangamon County Circuit Court ruled December 18 in Tax Analysts v. Illinois Department of Revenue that the DOR failed to show that producing the audit manual would be unduly burdensome. He required the department to provide the manual within 30 days.

The DOR declined to comment on the case.

Tax Analysts, publisher of Tax Notes, filed suit against the DOR in December 2018, arguing that the department was improperly withholding public records despite clear authority that the manual should be released.

Cornish Hitchcock, counsel for Tax Analysts, said December 26 that he was pleased that the judge saw the importance of releasing the manual. Roughly 40 states have made their manuals available or have provided them to Tax Analysts, and Illinois was the largest state that had not provided anything, he added.

Tax Analysts submitted a FOIA request in February 2017 for the field audit manuals and audit training manuals used by the DOR since January 1, 2011. In a March 2017 denial, the DOR argued that the audit manual “contains opinions and discussions that guide the enforcement of tax law, but it does not codify or reflect the Department’s policies.”

Tax Analysts narrowed its request in April 2018 to the audit manuals currently in use but the department again denied the request, citing the same exemptions used to deny the previous request and arguing that the request would be unduly burdensome under 5 ILCS section 140/3(g).

But Davis rejected the claim that producing the manual would be unduly burdensome, concluding that the plain meaning of 5 ILCS section 140/3(g) precluded the argument because Tax Analysts had not sought “all records falling within a category” but had sought only a single record.

Davis added that Tax Analysts had also narrowed its request and submitted sworn testimony regarding the public interest in the disclosure of the requested record.

Davis added that even if the unduly burdensome defense was applicable, the DOR’s declarations providing the number of hours that would be required to redact the audit manual was “unpersuasive for failing to demonstrate that the chapters sampled for review are representative of the manual as a whole.” He pointed out that two teams reviewing the materials took significantly different amounts of time.

Davis also rejected the DOR’s arguments that the manual should be exempt from disclosure in its entirety as containing “unique or specialized investigative techniques” or as part of a pre-decisional policy-making process.

Stating that the DOR had described the manual as a reference guide or guideline, Davis concluded that the manual was “created outside of and independently of any decision regarding a specific audit.”

“It is thus not a document created as part of an agency’s process for making a specific policy decision,” Davis continued. “It is instead a document that recites existing departmental policy and is used as a resource used to execute that policy.”

Davis also ruled that the DOR could not withhold the manual for containing “unique or specialized investigative techniques” because it had failed to submit any sworn testimony “that identifies or explains why specific portions of the requested manual satisfy statutory requirements.”

Tax Analysts has requested field audit manuals and audit training manuals from each state for its Audit Insight research tool, which was launched March 1, 2018. As of December 26, 39 states and the District of Columbia have either provided audit materials or made materials publicly available.

Copy RID