‘GAO report being suppressed’

The Fitial administration accused U.S. congressional staffers of “suppressing” a report by the Government Accountability Office on legislation to impose federal law on CNMI immigration.

The Governor’s Office in a statement said it had received information that GAO submitted its final report to Congress on March 28, 2008.

Citing a GAO source, the local government added that congressional staffers had asked GAO to keep the report from the public for 30 days unless the congressional staffers decide to release it at an earlier date.

Gov. Benigno R. Fitial said of the development, “Preventing the public release of the GAO report for as long as 30 days means that the members of Congress will not be informed of the many serious legal shortcomings of the important bill they are being asked to approve. We pointed many of these deficiencies in our comments to GAO.”

The GAO report was requested by the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

On Feb. 22, 2008, GAO circulated its draft report, allowing the CNMI government and concerned federal agencies such as the departments of Homeland Security, Interior, and Labor to comment on the initial findings. It is GAO’s practice to include such comments in the final version of the report.

According to the Fitial administration, one of the most controversial interpretations contained in the GAO draft report was its tentative view that the transition period defined under the bill could not be extended beyond Dec. 31, 2013.

Howard Willens, the governor’s special legal counsel who prepared the CNMI government’s comments on the draft report, said GAO’s interpretation is inconsistent with both the language of the bill and its legislative history. He said the U.S. Labor secretary is clearly given the authority to extend the transition period for periods of up to five years after considering a long list of relevant factors.

Willens also disagreed with GAO’s purported view that nonimmigrant foreign workers under the H visa program during the transition period are exempted from the requirements of the CNMI-only permit system. He said the permitting system mandated by the bill applies to all nonimmigrant workers in the Commonwealth.

Furthermore, Willens said that GAO, in preparing its economic analysis, should consider different legal interpretations of the bill, particularly with regard to the transition period and the H visas.

“We are not suggesting that GAO has an obligation to address each and every possible interpretation of the legislation advanced by one or more imaginative commentators. We believe that the two substantive issues addressed in this letter [CNMI government comments] provide examples of interpretations different from those advanced in the GAO draft report which might be the subject of separate economic analysis,” Willens said.

He characterized the federalization bill currently pending in the U.S. Senate as “poorly drafted” because of its ambiguity, which lends itself to differing legal interpretations, and because it grants the federal agencies that will execute it “excessively broad discretion” in how they will go about implementing the transition program for alien workers in the CNMI and the visa waiver program for Guam and the CNMI.

“The Commonwealth has been assured that GAO intends to prepare a ‘neutral’ report based on the legislation, which we take to mean that the agency’s economic analysis will be presented on a purely factual basis and not reflect any bias regarding the need for, or the merits of, the legislation. Such an analysis should, in our opinion, look at some of the critical issues raised by the bill with a clear understanding of the relevant facts and the alternative consequences of different agency decision,” Willens said.