Check out the IRE contest home page
Read the abstracts of the 1995 IRE contest winners and finalists. The site also includes winners going back to 1979, information on how to enter, and background on the judges for the 1995 contest. The site is at http://www.ire.org/contest
Data to think about
You can find more than 85,000 governmental bodies in the census of governments. In addition to states, counties, and cities, the census includes every taxing entity from sewer districts to school district to library districts.
The census looks at debt, property values, revenue and expenditures. The data includes the source of the revenue and purpose of the expenditure. There is also a directory file identifying all U.S. governmental units.
The census is conducted every five years in years ending in "2" and "7." The most recent year for which all the data is available is 1987. However, the preliminary finance file for 1992 is available on CD-ROM from the Census bureau.
To order the data, call the Census Bureau's customer service line at (301) 457-4100 Your state data center should also offer the data, probably at a cheaper rate.
NICARIANS moving on
Glaston Ford, a NICAR graduate researcher, has accepted a job as a computer-assisted reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
Also, staff member Natalya Shulyakovskaya has accepted a position with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's computer-assisted reporting program.
Taxed to the limit?
Taxpayers in some American communities are at least 10 times more likely to face criminal charges from the Internal Revenue Service than those living in others, according to a new analysis of internal government records.
Detailed data obtained by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), also show that the chances the IRS will recommend criminal charges against anyone are extraordinarily remote: only 17 per million. (The FBI says you're five times more likely to be murdered.)
TRAC's data is available via the web for reporters who want to do a CAR story on what's happening in their area. Reporters can download the data for individual federal districts.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a data research organization connected with Syracuse University. The co-directors of TRAC are David Burnham, a former investigative reporter with the New York Times, and Susan Long, a professor in Syracuse's School of Management who has specialized in IRS issues for more than 25
Keep up with NICAR online
Subscribe to our listserv and join in as reporters talk about how to do the job better. E-mail to LISTSERV@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU In the message, on the first line, write: subscribe NICAR-L your name. To join IRE on the Internet, the instructions are the same except, on first line, write: subscribe ire-1 your name.
IRE and NICAR are also accessible through CompuServe's Journalism Forum. Go to the JForum, Section 19. Also look into the IRE/NICAR files in Library 19.