Just amazing. Wherever you look — or, try to look — Bush is shutting down government transparency, and ignoring public information laws. Check this out. What reason could there be for not continuing the IRS’s 30-year practice of sharing audit information and statistics, other than to keep regular Americans from knowing that they are being increasingly audited, while rich individuals and corporations are not?
The Bush administration has broken the law by stopping the public release of detailed tax-enforcement data, which has been used to show which kinds of taxpayers get the most and toughest audits, a noted tax researcher says.Professor Susan B. Long of Syracuse University said … the Internal Revenue Service has violated a 1976 court order requiring the release of the data. … Ms. Long, who has researched and written about federal tax administration for more than 30 years, used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to win the court order in 1976 directing the revenue agency to provide her regularly with its data on criminal investigations, tax collections, the number and hours devoted to audits by income level and taxpayer category, and other enforcement records. …
Despite filing regular FOIA requests for the material, the last data Ms. Long received arrived Nov. 1, 2004, and covered only the first six months of fiscal 2004, through March of that year, she said. “They really shut down access,” she said.
Transparency is what makes a government endure. Shutting down access to information weakens the government and the nation. Why does this man hate freedom of information so much? Is he trying to destroy the country?
