Britain Releases Censored List of Expenses

After weeks of newspaper disclosures and political turmoil swirling around the expense accounts of legislators, the British authorities finally published their own version of the accounts on Thursday, but with crucial data blacked out.

Steve Parsons/Press Association

Kitty Ussher, a junior minister, quit over allegations of avoiding capital gains taxes.

Reuters

An expense claim made by the Conservative party leader, David Cameron.

The dubious expense claims have forced a string of legislators and ministers to quit, the latest of them late Wednesday when Kitty Ussher, a junior Treasury minister, resigned over allegations published in The Daily Telegraph that she had avoided capital gains taxes worth around $27,000 through the practice of redesignating a second home as her primary residence.
Under British government rules, legislators may claim up to $38,000 a year to defray the costs of a second home, either in their electoral district or near Parliament in London. While primary residences do not incur capital gains taxes when they are sold, profit on second homes is taxable. The Daily Telegraph said Ms. Ussher had redesignated a second home as a primary residence shortly before selling it. The financial maneuver has become known as “flipping” and several other politicians have been accused of profiting from it.
Ms. Ussher, 38, announced her resignation on Wednesday evening after The Daily Telegraph’s disclosure appeared on its Web site. She said she was leaving to spare Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government embarrassment and would not seek re-election to Parliament. But she insisted that she had acted within the law.
The newspaper has been basing weeks of disclosures on an unedited official database it obtained about legislators’ expenses. Last year, the High Court ordered Parliament to release the same information, but it did so only on Monday, publishing tens of thousands of claim forms and receipts on the Parliament Web site.
“More than a million printed documents and receipts have been scanned electronically over the last year in a major publishing operation” to make information on the lawmakers’ allowances “freely available to the public online,” the Web site said, referring to members of Parliament.
Many of the details, including telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and descriptions of expense items, were blacked out on what the authorities said were security and privacy grounds.
Nonetheless, some of the legible sections listed items like mortgage payments worth about $2,880 per month for the opposition Conservative leader David Cameron, and a charge by Mr. Brown of about $520 for “pest control.” Other documents showed Mr. Cameron claiming more than $1,000 for household maintenance, including the cost of replacing washers on faucets, light bulbs and cleaning the chimney of an expensive country-style Aga stove favored by some sections of the British middle classes.
Vince Cable, a spokesman for the small Liberal Democrat opposition party, called the censored documents “compromised.”
“Had it not been for The Daily Telegraph, a lot of this stuff would not have come out,” he told The Press Association news agency.

Source :NYT