Content area
Full Text
In colonial days, authorities put miscreants in the stocks to punish and publicly humiliate them. Now, the city uses the Internet.
The Giuliani administration last week listed the city's 19 biggest business tax delinquents on its Web page in an effort to shame them into paying up.
Officials say the plan is working. Threatened with public disclosure, several taxpayers hurried in to discuss their cases in order to avoid being publicly listed on the Internet as tax deadbeats.
Several of the firms that were posted on the Web site have since contacted the city to resolve their debts.
"We anticipated that the prospect of public disclosure would motivate some taxpayers to come forward, and that's exactly what has...