Apparently, the people of the state of Delaware are willing to tolerate a great deal. They’ll put up with a campaign finance disclosure website that makes it nearly impossible for any campaign finances to actually be disclosed, as I found out last month. Apparently, they’ll also pay $20 a pop to access their own government’s public information over the web.
The state government of Delaware maintains a registry of corporations, just as any other state does. But unlike other states (see Alaska, Florida, Idaho and Kentucky for examples), Delaware does not allow free public access to information about those corporations. Every time a person wishes to obtain an online listing of a corporation’s recent public filings, she or he has to pay a $20 fee.
This is not a fee necessary to cover to cost of printing and mailing — there is no printing or mailing involved, since the entire transaction is online. It’s not a fee necessary to cover the costs of administering corporate records — that’s more than covered by Delaware’s hefty schedule of fees of hundreds of dollars for scores of possible corporate activities from registration to dissolution. No, this fee serves two purposes for the state of Delaware. First, it uses government control of information to extract money from citizens. Second, it serves as a bar for citizens who want to find out about the public business being done in Delaware. Is that information you’re looking for really worth $20?
Maybe the people of Delaware will pay $20 a pop to retrieve public information the government is holding. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe that’s the idea.
And of course the Attorney General of Delaware won’t look into it as being a conflict of interest at best and unconstitutional at worst (for which they’d have to take this pay to play strategy off their books – and lose all that revenue). No, this is another of those “hiding in plain sight” obstacles to corporate(/government) dealings that the government is “allowing” to go on until challenged, which would then foster a series of long drawn out court cases that would glacially move up to the Surprise Court, then to be deliberated for about 15 seconds before most everyone votes it “ok” and the drama ends in another “i told you so” corporate victory over the “small” people.
The ship’s going down with all hands and passengers with it. Only the owners get to have “lifeboats.”