The Washington State Republican Party (WAGOP) and Journalist Jonathan Choe have jointly filed an injunction in Superior Court in Thurston County barring the State of Washington from scrubbing or removing public access to records concerning childcare centers in the State of Washington that receive public funds.
Today’s action is unfortunate but urgent and necessary. State bureaucratic agencies in Olympia are deleting and altering public documents—posted on government web sites—that are related to the unfolding childcare fraud scandal in this state. This must stop immediately.
“We requested a month of attendance records from 31 licensed in-home providers to determine if they operated within the limits of their authorized capacity. Of the 31 we selected, nine (29%) did not respond to our request for records and another nine (29% did not provide records for between two and 15 children for whom they received a subsidy-payment for the selected month,” recalls Choe in the Complaint.
Choe has repeatedly announced efforts (along with Cam Higby) to stop DCYF from further scrubbing Somali daycare-related data, demanding restoration of erased information from the past week.
“Journalists and ordinary Washingtonians have been using these publicly posted documents to investigate credible allegations of corruption in how state and federal tax dollars are being paid to childcare centers here in Washington,” says WAGOP Chairman Jim Walsh. “State bureaucrats hiding this public information from the people is illegal and unconstitutional. It certainly violates common-sense standards of government transparency and accountability. We need more transparency in Olympia, not less.”
Politically partisan hysterics from WA Attorney General Nick Brown and others are trying to say that the righteous investigation into alleged childcare fraud is somehow discriminatory or harassing of certain individuals; this is false.
Those who support these investigations are more interested in the bureaucratic agencies making the allegedly fraudulent grants and direct payments. We want to hold these bureaucrats accountable for how they are spending taxpayers’ money. These same bureaucrats deleting or altering potentially incriminating documents is an outrage. To ensure good government, we demand that the courts stop this outrageous behavior!
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