Adam Crum, who has been running for governor for months as a state employee, claims he understands the “function of government, the function of the Legislature, the important things to the private sector, so I’ll have a functioning government up and running faster than anybody else.”
But he doesn’t seen to understand one of the core functions of the state Department of Revenue, where he was commissioner until last week.
Crum blocked efforts by the Legislature to have the revenue department present oil tax collection information in an intelligible manner.
He said the Legislature should be able to get by with raw tables of numbers, with no explanation from his department. Gibberish is no substitute for information.
“It’s going to be very costly in order to put it in this particular format, but they’re going to do that, and then everybody will see that there is no information that is being lost,” he told reporter Eric Stone.
The fear that led the Legislature to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of the transparency bill had little to do with “information” being lost. It was all about money being lost.
The worry is that Alaska has given hundreds of millions away because Crum and Dunleavy looked kindly upon the oil companies and didn’t bother them with too many questions about their tax returns.
The worry is that the Dunleavy/Crum regime has been very costly for Alaskans.
One of the functions of the Department of Revenue is to explain what it collected and why. Releasing tables of unintelligible numbers is government dysfunction.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
