Tax agencies could collect racial data but uniformly choose not to

Evidence

The tools do exist: The Internal Revenue Service currently matches Social Security numbers with tax return data to provide statistical information about taxpayer gender and age to the Treasury. Until 2002, the Social Security Administration also collected data on race—so why wasn’t that information matched with tax returns as well? It’s an unexplained policy choice, according to Associate Professor Jeremy Bearer-Friend of the George Washington University Law School, and a strangely uniform one when it comes to excluding racial data, spanning the IRS, the Treasury, and the Joint Committee on Taxation. “Isn’t it curious,” he asked me, “that a policy area so centrally concerned with the redistribution of wealth is also one where race and ethnicity data are so persistently excluded?” — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 516

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did SSA stop collecting race data in 2002, and was any racial data ever matched with returns before then? Worth chasing the specific history.
• XREF: Connects to the colorblind-administration critique in Critical Race Theory scholarship — formally race-neutral bureaucracy as mechanism of racial exclusion.
• SHARE: Send to a tax-policy or critical-race friend: the IRS already matches SSNs to report gender/age splits but has never published racial splits despite matched SSA race data existing until 2002.