The legislative session ended last month, but tension persists between the governor and state lawmakers.
In late May, legislative leaders sent Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy a letter criticizing the Department of Revenue for, as the letter put it, obstructing the Legislature's access to information on oil and gas taxes. Specifically, lawmakers have been trying to figure out if the state is getting the tax money it is owed.
According to the Anchorage Daily News, the last such review covered a time period from 2006 to 2011 and found the state was owed more than a billion dollars in taxes.
That review was in 2018. Dunleavy has been governor since then, and the administration has refused to give legislators the same information that previous administrations gave up willingly.
ADN reporter Iris Samuels wrote about the letter and says it's just the latest chapter in a long-running saga spanning pretty much the entire Dunleavy administration.
Below is the transcript of an interview with Samuels on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Iris Samuels: These numbers are pretty basic, and what the legislative auditor has said is, if the Department of Revenue is not collecting this information in this particular easily digestible form, that in itself is cause for concern, because we should really know, pretty offhand, pretty easily, how much the state is assessing in extra taxes every year.
Casey Grove: Right. So, I mean, there's this letter, but then this past practice of the Department of Revenue willingly providing this information to the Legislature is also now the subject of a bill that seeks to compel the administration to do that. And I guess part of this is also that those legislators are concerned that the governor might veto that bill, right?
IS: Right. So lawmakers basically got together this year and passed this bill that is meant to underscore existing powers that the state, that the legislative auditor has. So it's really not giving the legislative auditor new powers. It's just a bill that says these are the authorities of the legislative auditor, whose role is defined in the state Constitution, and basically asking in a new form, the administration of the governor, to comply with requests that come from the legislative auditor.
And then going to this letter, the letter accompanied the bill. And so the goal there from the House Speaker and the Senate President was to send a message to the governor, who is no stranger to the veto pen, "Hey, please don't veto this particular piece of legislation."
CG: Tell me more about the extraordinary nature of that, because I think, you know, some people might look at it and say, "OK, well, they sent him a letter. So what? It's just a letter." But that's actually pretty rare for this kind of a circumstance, right?
IS: Yeah, to be fair, I haven't been covering the Legislature for that long, but I've never heard of the presiding officers sending a letter directly to the governor to accompany a piece of legislation. And what this letter says is basically that this goes to the very heart of state government in Alaska, and this idea that we have a legislative branch, we have an administration, and they should really be working together for the benefit of the people of Alaska, not working as sort of opposing sides.
So it remains to be seen. He could actually, you know, take the letter to heart. And we really don't know what's behind all this. Again, in theory, the gravest concern is that the state has been leaving some money on the table, that it could be collecting from oil and gas companies in taxes. But we don't know if that's the case. Maybe the state is actually performing the audits as it has in the past. It's collecting all this extra revenue, and we just don't know.
CG: I guess, I mean, we also don't know why, right? Speaking of Gary Stevens, Senate President Gary Stevens, his quote in your story was something about, you know, "We don't know if this is incompetence, or, you know, these folks are incapable of doing this work."
What do you think about that? I mean, have you gotten any indications that it's just, it's too much of a burden to put this together, people are not doing their jobs, or is the information actually being, like, withheld for some reason?
IS: I reached out to the Department of Revenue with questions for this story, and I did not get a response. But one thing that is worth pointing out is that several pretty high-up officials within the Department of Revenue have left under the tenure of the current Commissioner of Revenue, and that's Adam Crum.
Adam Crum is actually the third Revenue Commissioner under Gov. Dunleavy. He really has not spoken publicly about this. He was invited to address a legislative committee hearing when the Legislature was still in session, and he didn't show up, and that caused a lot of House members who were in that committee to be quite upset. The legislative leaders really were wanting to hear directly from the source about what was behind all of this, again, under the assumption that potentially there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
CG: Which we're still waiting to hear, right?
IS: Right.
CG: So where does this go from here? We're just sort of on a veto watch?
IS: Yeah, I think we'll wait to see what happens with this piece of legislation, and then, regardless of what happens, we're still waiting for the results of this audit. We still, we really just want to know, bottom line, is the state collecting the tax revenue that it is owed?
