This is a follow-up to to
my last posting where I requested the tax forms of ICANN to see the salaries of their
top officers. Posted below is the response from the ICANN CEO.As you can
see there are a series of reasons why the information is not contained in the publically
available tax documents. In addition, they apparently have to file this information
with the state of CA at the end of June so I asked them to simply supply the information
now.
Now ICANN will not answer at all except to provide me with a series
of evasive responses.
This is just one example of where you request a small piece
of information that is going to be public information shortly anyway but the ICANN
staff goes to incredible lengths to try to block access to it. I guess they
do not want to get at whatever it is they are doing.
Hopefully this serve as a
warning for those that wish to get involved in ICANN issues. As you can verify
from former and current participants, it is a complete waste of time to try to do
anything within ICANN. They are going to do what they want and just put out
a few news releases claiming they are open.
I am agin requesting that
the full salaries of the ICANN officers be made available in the budget submission
and that they be posted at the ICANN web site
Russ Smith
===
Dear Russ
-
We always appreciate your detailed interest in our affairs. The
current
status of the various documents is that the IRS is still
reviewing our 1023 request
for tax exemption. I understand from
Commissioner Rossotti's public comments
that the agency is very
shorthanded these days so your guess is as good as mine
about when
our tax exemption letter will be issued. When the agency completes
work on the filing, we will post both the exemption letter and
related supporting
materials on our web site.
We have been granted our State of California tax exemption
and we
have filed our financial report for our first short fiscal year
ending
June 30, 1999 with the state, which has recently inagurated a
program of providing
online access to all tax exempt tax filings in
California. I don't
have any more details than that.
We intend to scan the federal 990 and put it up
on our web site in
the next few weeks. The numbers in the 990 are the same as
the
numbers in our published financial report which has been on the web
site
since last fall, except that the IRS combines some categories
differently than
do the CPA's who do the financial report. In the
meantime, any member of
the public may inspect the report at our
office in Marina del Rey on request
per the IRS regs.
Since there were no ICANN employees during the period ending
June 30,
1999, there is no salary data in the filing. As previously reported
to the Congress last summer in connection with Department of Commerce
oversight
hearings, the CEO is compensated through a professional
services agreement with
the Darwin Group, Incorporated, a California
corporation, on a month to month
basis at the current rate of
$18,000. Compensation of other staff members
prior to July 1, 1999
was handled through several different professional services
and
consulting agreements.
- Mike Roberts
==
-----Original Message-----
From:
Esther Dyson [mailto:edyson@edventure.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 1:28
PM
To: russ@russ-smith.com
Cc: Mike Roberts; touton@icann.org; ajm@icann.org
Subject:
Re: Re: I want to see how much you clowns make
Russ,
If I really wanted
to get rich, there are better ways to do it than through
ICANN!
Esther