TRAC's History TRAC was established in 1989 as a research center at Syracuse University. TRAC's Use of FOIA TRAC's core purpose is to make information about the federal government's enforcement and regulatory effort more accessible to the public. All you need to do is ask. In fact, the systematic collection of such information usually is a difficult and time-consuming task.
Some agencies are remarkably open.
Other agencies are not. In some circumstances TRAC has to file suit in federal court to force the release of vital data. An example of these efforts is TRAC's current suit against the Justice Department . Once TRAC obtains the data through its FOIA efforts, the information is analyzed. With the use of a variety of sophisticated statistical techniques, the raw information obtained from the agencies is checked and verified.