Is hiding the truth the same as a lie?
You be the judge.
According to Merriam-Webster,
the intransitive verb to “lie” has this definition:
1. to
make an untrue statement with intent
to deceive;2. to create a false or misleading impression.
By way of context,
recall from last week’s blog post that after submitting a Right to Know (RTK) request to PASSHE on July 21,
2012 I received a PDF file purportedly listing the actual revenues and
expenditures for the entity OOC+BOG for all fiscal years between 1993 and
2013. I will get to that in a moment.
First let’s look at the brief email exchange¹ between me, the RTK requester, and Kenn Marshall, PASSHE’s RTK Officer, i.e., the person to whom RTK requests to PASSHE are to be directed.
Note first that my one-sentence request to PASSHE’s RTK Officer is very specific:
“I hereby request electronic copies of the final E&G budget reports (actual revenues vs. actual expenditures) for Fiscal Years 1992 to 2011 for the financial entity described in Act 188 as the combination of the Board of Governors and the Office of the Chancellor which, by that law, is limited to actual revenue amounting to one-half of one percent of the total PASSHE budget.”
Note that in his four-sentence reply, Kenn Marshall repeats the essence of my request by using quotation marks to repeat the words of my request to him. That is, he acknowledged that I was requesting “actual revenues and expenditures,” and not a “Summary of Budget Requests,” which is a totally different thing.
Marshall’s email concludes in part with these words: “Your request is granted. A file containing the documents complying with your request is attached to this response.” (Emphasis added.)
Note that he never states that the attached document contains the “actual revenues and expenditures;” he merely implies that it does, first by cleverly quoting the key words in my actual request, and then by using the words “complying with your request” to characterize the contents of the document as containing the “actual revenues and expenditures” for the OOC+BOG entity in question.
In fact, the document² Kenn Marshall attached to his email did not
contain the actual revenues and expenditures of OOC+BOG, as the title of the
19-page document attests: “Budget Request Summary.”
“The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed,
but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
Budget requests are submitted months before they can be acted upon by both
houses of the State Legislature and signed into law by the Governor. In that sense, budget requests are no more
than agency “wish lists.”
Budget requests are not a list of the actual revenues received at
different points throughout the fiscal year—typically in advance of the summer,
fall and spring terms—and they are certainly not a list of actual expenditures,
some of which may not be completed until right up to the very last day of the
fiscal year.
Revenues and expenditures clearly constitute official financial
figures that can only be accounted for “after the fact.” They then provide an important fact-basis for
PASSHE’s audited financial statements.
It is clear that
what Kenn Marshall sent me in response to my RTK request meets the terms of
the second item under Merriam-Webster’s definition of “to
lie:” i.e., “to create a false or misleading impression.”
Not so clear is whether his actions meet the terms of the
first item: “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” (Emphasis added.)
As we all know, intent is not easy to establish because even bad liars are loath to admit that they intended to deceive anyone, instead seeming to prefer something like - “It was all just a misunderstanding.”
In earlier blog posts we provided evidence in support of the assertion that PASSHE officials have recently been seen employing the tools and tactics of deception, for example: 1) by halting publication of PASSHE FactBooks that had previously enabled all stakeholders to note PASSHE’s enrollment, educational and financial trends; and 2) by operating without a strategic plan for more than four years and then issuing a strategic plan that ignores the Act 188 statutory purpose of the PASSHE universities, and creates out of whole cloth a new vision for PASSHE that makes the “System” rather than the “Students” its central focus.
Hide the Truth
In a treatise³ by A. Orange
entitled “Propaganda and
Debating Techniques,” we find under the above heading the following quote:
“Hide the truth by
erasing it, or rewriting it, or destroying evidence, or stashing it someplace
out of sight. Don't let people see the truth.
“Such dishonest
behavior is often rationalized by saying, "We don't want people to get the
wrong idea."
Which really means: "We don't want people to get the right idea."”
Which really means: "We don't want people to get the right idea."”
Follow the Money
Marshall may not have intended to deceive—but someone
apparently did—perhaps the finance person in the Office of the Chancellor who furnished
the Budget Request Summary masquerading as the Revenues and Expenditures. Was that an attempt to deceive in order to
protect the financial secrets of OOC+BOG?
Another bit of deception may be seen in the title of the actual PDF file which Kenn Marshall sent me as an attachment to his email: “OOC Actuals - 93-11.PDF.” Someone took the time to put a false label on this PDF file since its contents are clearly a “Budget Request Summary” and not the OOC+BOG “Actuals.”
Next time, we will look in detail at Kenn Marshall’s PDF file and, by comparing certain entries with those in another very different PASSHE document, we will discover several questionable multi-million dollar transfers of funds into and out of the OOC+BOG fund balance.
² https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/7748224/ooc-actuals-93-11-pdf-1-2-meg.
³ http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-propaganda.html#hide.
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