The IRS collected racial data until 2002 but never matched it

Evidence

Corporations have no clear incentive to collect and share this information—unless they’re already hiring and compensating fairly, or national protests (like we saw during the summer of 2020) force their hands. But there’s no justifiable reason for the government not to collect and make public tax statistics by race. 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 the SSA stop collecting racial data in 2002, and what political context produced that cutoff? Worth chasing.
• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s stated goal — this is the ‘deliberate hole in the evidence’ she builds the argument around.