The anatomy of a story--tax refunds ARE delayed

Let's rewind the tape, if you will.

Three days ago, I was making some initial phone calls for a possible story I wanted to do on reports of state tax refunds being delayed. One of those calls was to the News & Record's Mark Binker.

I reported on our interesting telephone exchange Tuesday.

An excerpt:

Binker: Erik, I hope this doesn't come out the wrong way, but you're a competitor and I have no interest in helping you. It's a non-issue. I made some calls on that not long ago, but frankly, there was no story. You have not had nice things to say about our publication lately so therefore, I will not be helping you.

The story the N&R was allegedly going to do was dead and buried...there was no story. It was a non-issue, this despite multiple postings on message boards on Yahoo! to e-mails at WRAL in the Triangle.

Apparently, it was a story for WRAL.



This also prompted a surprising blog posting from Binker yesterday:

The following came via e-mail from Linda Struyk Millsaps, the Chief Operating Officer of the N.C. Department of Revenue. It is a statement from Revenue Sec. Kenneth Lay:

"We are experiencing a temporary backlog in issuing refunds because of the difficulty of garnering the special funds we are using for cash flow. We expect some significant progress to be made in the next few weeks. We are writing checks every week, and everyone who is due a refund will get a refund."

A side note: this directly contradicts what I was told not once but twice in the past two weeks by the Department's spokeswoman, Kim Brooks. She said that there were no problems or delays in issuing refunds.

I also wonder where this falls in the pantheon of things that Gov. Bev Perdue doesn't want to be surprised by.

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I appreciate Mr. Binker's reporting on this. I'm unsure if he was pressured into pursuing this from downtown from this blog or what...but the lead story here is not that refunds are being delayed...it's that how this story (which is still simply a N&R blog posting right now) came to be. Three days ago, this was a non-story, it was a non-issue.

I don't have a hatchet to bury. If tax refunds are being delayed and the state doesn't want people to know about it, that's a major story, and every media outlet in this state ought to be on this story. If the state is broke and cannot afford to send out refunds, it is a major story. Six weeks later after e-filing, I'm still waiting on my state refund to come in.

The anatomy of a story. Hooray for citizen journalism.

E.C. :)