NJ Watchdog: Christie keeps $95k expense account secret

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended his failure to report any of his $95,000 annual entertainment allowance on tax returns, arguing the money isn’t income because he has accounted for it.

Just don’t ask him to make those records available to the public. Through his press secretary, Christie rejected New Jersey Watchdog’s request to disclose how he spent the cash.

Government-transparency advocates and tax specialists fired back.

“If it’s not public, then you’re not being accountable because it’s the public who decides whether or not you have a job,” said Bill Allison, senior fellow at Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit advocate for transparency in government. “I don’t know how they can be saying these are not public records and can’t be disclosed.”

“To hold your public officials accountable, you have to know what they’re spending money on,” said Sheila Weinberg, CEO of Truth in Accounting, a non-profit watchdog for fiscal responsibility in government. “The public has a right and a need to know.”

The full story is online at http://watchdog.org/212497/christie-expense-account-secret-2/.

New tools for political bloggers

I was over at Kelly Heyboer's Jersey Blogs at NJ.com and found one of her posts very interesting.

It is about a website called Sunlight Foundation. 

Sunlight Foundation has put together a clever tool for us political bloggers, to learn all about our members of Congress.  There is a lot of data out there about elected officials, their fundraising, their personal money and the bills they support. The Sunlight Foundation has brought data together from different sites and agencies to create lawmaker profiles.

You can checkout any lawmaker you wish to see who are his/her top contributors are, what federal earmarks they have gotten, where their personal money and the federal contracts that they had gotten for their states.

Click on the headline to see the Sunlight Foundation