Op Ed: It`s YOUR Tax Payment:
Clearly NOT Cash Meant
For Corporate 'Accounting'

PGE’s co-mingling role for tax-collection --Enron style?

(SALEM) - `Some things are so very simple," my mother taught me, `you should never have any problem keeping them straight." I`ll bet some of the same came from your mother, too. One of the first situations she worked on --very hard-- was `someone else`s cash." IF you carry away their dollars to be paid to somebody, you make `double-sure" the dollars `get where you said you were taking them." That`s what she said --repeatedly. PGE`s co-mingling role for tax-collection --Enron/casual style-- with millions of our Oregonian dollars meant for sure as tax payments, brings this sharply to mind --AGAIN !! First court decisions via consumer-advocate suit show that the judge`s mother figured this out same as mine. Now again PUC `progress" in readying for `new" action re inevitable next-rate/rise spotlights past `progress" --AGAIN !! Deep, sharp, very-pointed concern is aroused, too, even if only partially connected to rate increases. The resounding cry now resulting from extra compensation bestowed on former Enron-time operating officers at PGE. `There`s a very bad name for those who don`t do that right," my mother told me, `and you must never forget !" Especially if you are a monopoly service utility seeking a substantial rate-rise, and have just billowed out --again-- your main-managers major compensations. Some of the same main-managers managing during those distressing and deeply-damaging manipulations now widely known as one of the worst corporate collapses ever achieved; occurring while Enron `owned" PGE --and was receiving your dollars designed and destined for tax payments. Highly-paid attorneys can turn things upside down in court, making whatever was done look really legal. That`s why they`re mostly highly paid. Even though not always `common-sense" --like my mother. They can find corporate accounting complexities like you wouldn`t believe. Even the very accommodating Public Utilities Commission may have further trouble doing so, this time. Believing, that is. Those corporate accounting complexities are so smothering they desensitize even experts, like the PUC staffers and chiefs; applying what the Legislature wrote, for once, so clearly. For what it may be worth - NOW. One court has already stated that PGE rate-payers in one County whose dollars were mingled will get real refunds. There`s `the heart of the matter": This situation is worth many, many millions, both to the corporations convulsed with the coming pain of paying back what never got paid off to tax agencies; and to consumer advocates seeking to make sense today of what my mother told me... `Be sure you deliver any dollars given you for someone else." Not to mention those attorneys slaving so hard over such silly situations as Enron created, right here in Oregon, at our own once-respected PGE. Their billings will be `smothering." Sen.408 passed last session, perhaps with fingers-crossed. It makes fundamental pro-consumer change in how tax dollars must be handled by corporate collectors. There are those who liked it the way it was in Enron-time. Then PUC felt `simple stand-alone companies" held YOUR tax-cash; even though the Enron `corporate structure" was already well-recognized as `smothering". Which is why all those high-priced attorneys are also `deeply involved" --with the depth of their billings yet to be determined by how `smothering" they can get, this time --AGAIN !! We may find out, very soon, what their mothers taught THEM. Which should tell US what we should teach the PUC, preferably before promulgation and further complexity is perpetrated on what simple common sense surely seems to show us. Could it be that Mother `had it wrong" ??