
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 23, 1994                   TAG: 9408160054
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

BRIEFLY PUT . . .

MORE than 1,300 employees of the Internal Revenue Service stand accused of electronic snooping - using government computers to browse through tax returns which they apparently had no bureaucratic business getting into.

Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, says it's difficult to say how much of this unofficial and unauthorized spying was a prelude to fraud, and how much was just "prurient window peeping" on their friends.

Either way, it's shocking. The former because fraud, of course, is a serious crime. The latter because who'd have guessed that so many IRS agents have friends.

GOV. GEORGE Allen is zeroing in on waste and inefficiency in state government. In the waste category, his Commission on Government Reform recently cited 700,000 calls made by state workers to directory assistance at a cost to taxpayers of $500,000.

That does seem excessive. More should let their fingers do the walking through the telephone books. On the other hand, with the rapid changes Allen is making in state-agency personnel, and the fear of job insecurity he has put in them, perhaps some of those directory-assistance calls were necessary to find out who's who,where, and doing what within their own ranks, and what sorts of jobs may be opening up elsewhere.

by CNB