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By Suzanne Perry

A federal judge today handed open-records activist Carl Malamud a victoryÌýin his battleÌýto get the Internal Revenue Service to release Form 990 tax returns in a format that can be read by computers, thus making information about nonprofit operations far more accessible.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick rejected the IRS’s argument that producing the documents requested by Mr. Malamud’s group, Public.Resource.Org, would create a significant burden on an overstretched agency.

“The fact that an agency may be under significant financial distress because it is underfunded does not excuse an agency’s duty to comply with the [Freedom of Information Act],” he saidÌýin a rulingÌýfiled in U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California.

He gave the IRS 60 days to produce the Forms 990 in machine-readable format for nine nonprofits named in Mr. Malamud’s suit, all of which had submitted their returns electronically. The agency has until then to file an appeal. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, which represented the IRS in court, said government lawyers were reviewing the ruling.

The IRS now strips nonprofit tax filings of confidential information and converts them to image files, even those that have been filed electronically. That makes it difficult to conduct digital operations like searches of multiple forms.