Help Nab Lawyers, IRS Asks Pennsylvania : Taxes: Agency seeks attorneys’ names and Social Security numbers in effort to find non-filers. Civil liberties experts express concern.

The Internal Revenue Service has asked Pennsylvania officials to provide the names and Social Security numbers of the state’s 53,000 lawyers as part of a nationwide effort to track down lawyers and other professionals who have failed to file tax returns.

A similar effort targeting lawyers and accountants is under way in Chicago. In New York City, the IRS is screening partnership information from major law firms to detect partners who have not filed returns.

The efforts are part of the agency’s aggressive pursuit of non-filers over the past year. Under the program, the IRS runs names and Social Security numbers through its computers to find people who should have filed tax returns, but have not.

The IRS receives a deluge of forms from employers, banks, brokers and others with which it can trace non-filers. This method allows the agency to narrow its search to those with substantial income.

However, the breadth of the IRS dragnet in Pennsylvania surprised even longtime tax professionals. “I have been practicing for 42 years and I am not aware of any precedent where information was sought on as broad a basis as this,” said John S. Nolan, a past chairman of the American Bar Assn.’s Taxation Section and a former deputy assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department.

The government requests for computerized data for these broad-based inquiries raised concerns among experts on civil liberties and privacy who labeled the IRS’s request in Pennsylvania “a fishing expedition.”

“The government is not supposed to round up people (without) . . . the reasonable suspicion that someone has committed a crime,” said Stefan Presser, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. Presser added that it seemed logical that the constitutional protections would extend to “rounding up people electronically.”

However, IRS officials said--and several tax attorneys, including Nolan, agreed--that the agency has broad authority “to inquire after and concerning all persons who may be liable to pay any internal revenue tax.”

Failure to file has been a sensitive issue for both lawyers and accountants, many of whom are involved in preparing tax returns for others. In past years, there have been embarrassing revelations of lawyers or accountants who have not filed their own tax returns.

New York state tax officials found that 4% of the lawyers in the New York City area had failed to file state tax returns, according to a story in the New York Law Journal.

The issue has become so important that the IRS has set up a special service so that law firms, with permission of their members, may submit names and Social Security numbers of their lawyers and get confirmation that these lawyers have filed returns.

Firms with substantial tax practices run a particular risk. If a partner is found to be a non-filer, he or she could be suspended or disbarred from practicing before the IRS. If the offending lawyer remained in the firm, it also could jeopardize the ability of other firm lawyers to practice before the IRS.

In Pennsylvania, the IRS’s Pittsburgh office submitted its request to an arm of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which keeps these records. Pennsylvania officials were weighing the request Friday “in the context of privacy issues” and did not reach a final decision, according to Thomas Darr, a spokesman for the court’s administrative office.