The names of close relatives of two county commissioners were omitted from a delinquent-tax notice recently published in a weekly paper in Robeson County, North Carolina, according to The Robesonian. The county’s daily newspaper also reports that the names of the same individuals were wrongly excluded from the list the previous year, and that the practice of protecting certain individuals by deleting their names from the tax notices goes back at least two decades, according to a former Tax Office employee.

After hearing the former employee’s allegation, The Robesonian reviewed the 2017 list, which it had published. The paper discovered a handful of other delinquent taxpayers who were omitted but couldn’t find any obvious connections between those taxpayers and public officials.

“We have no idea if this is the iceberg or the tip,” said Donnie Douglas, editor of The Robesonian. “We are talking about thousands of people and more than 12,000 parcels. We could put a team on this to work all day, every day for a month, and there is no way of knowing if they would uncover a lot more or nothing, but our resources are limited.”

The County Board of Commissioners later voted 4-3 not to republish the corrected list in The Robesonian, with those opposing the motion citing cost. One of the two commissioners whose relatives were omitted from the notice voted in favor of the motion; the other voted against it.

PNRC wrote an opinion piece published last week in Raleigh’s News & Observer arguing that the incident in Robeson County illustrates why it’s a bad idea to allow public officials to post public notices on their own websites, where they can easily be hidden. Other newspapers may publish the piece with proper attribution, which is included at the conclusion of the column copy linked below.

[PNRC: We can’t rely on public officials to voluntarily surrender public information]