The government can’t stand businesses that won’t fork over their sales taxes. So the Minnesota Revenue Department has taken to posting a regularly updated list of those whose sales tax licenses have been revoked. This week, the revenue folks trumpeted their success in collecting $124,000 in the first few weeks that they’ve posted the list.

It’s a time-tested recipe: name names, and the companies and individuals just might be embarrassed into changing their ways. Police are doing it by posting the pictures of prostitution clients (such as the Chicago police gallery of johns here). For those of us who believe in government openness and access to public records, however, it’s a mixed message. On the one hand, it’s an affirmation of the importance of government telling the public about what it does. On the other hand, the act of using records as a “hall of shame” implies that such records will normally be kept secret from the public, but only trotted out to serve government’s purposes.

In my view, all government agencies with an enforcement function should regularly tell the public what they’re doing, just like the police have done for years. It should be just as easy to find out who’s polluting the air, injuring workers or violating care standards at nursing homes as it is to find out who just got popped for robbing a bank. But it isn’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Public records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.