Question Authority
Here's your chance. Pinnacle Financial Partners has posted the following notice on its website:

State of Tennessee Finance and Administration Commissioner Dr. Warren Neel will be the guest speaker at the Pinnacle Forum on November 12. Neel will be on-hand to discuss the state’s fiscal outlook. If you are interested in attending this seminar, please e-mail the Learning Center coordinator to reserve a seat.

More info: Pinnacle Financial Partners is the holding company for Pinnacle National Bank. The Neel appearance will be at the Bell South Building in downtown Nashville, Nov. 12, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. Reserve a seat via email or by calling Nancy Livezey at 744-3710. before Friday, Nov. 8th.

Neel is one of the Sundquist administration's major income tax proponents, the the extent that he politicized his office and prostituted it to the income tax agenda. As documented repeatedly on this site, Neel's office frequently slants its monthly revenue data press releases to favor the income tax agenda - often by deceptively omitting data that doesn't support his case.

As I wrote eight months ago in an essay published at Tax Free Tennessee, Neel was "deliberately using misleading analysis of revenue data in order to make the state's fiscal problems appear worse and enhance the chances of passing an income tax."

How did Neel do it? In one case, his office subtracted from its sales tax data all revenue collected from the rising sales of new vehicles in order to make it appear that there had been "practically no growth in holiday sales tax collections" in Tennessee. But only months earlier Neel was specifically focusing on revenue from auto sales in the tax data because sales of new vehicles were down.

As I noted in my essay published on TFT, Back then, we were asked to focus on sales tax revenue from vehicle sales because it was declining. Today, we are asked to ignore the same revenue source because it is rising. ... The truth is, Neel and his boss, Gov. Sundquist, want you to ignore good news and focus only on the data they selectively choose and deceptively spin in order to make it appear the sales tax is why we have a deficit. Rising revenue is ignored, falling revenue is spotlighted.

More recently, Neel's office has issued revenue data press releases that selectvely look at revenue based on whether it is up or down compared to last month or the same month in the prior fiscal year. If revenue was up compared to the same month a year before but down compared to the previous month, they focused on the latter. And vice versa.

The good news is, Neel is leaving his office at the end of Gov. Sundquist's term. We can only hope he is replaced by someone who tells the whole truth and doesn't spin the facts to support a political agenda.

Meanwhile, you can come hear Neel spin the truth - and call him on it - at the Pinnacle Forum.