By, Nicole Winfield
Associated Press/Boston GlobeJuly 16, 1999
United Nations - The United Nations has sought to distance itself from a U.N. report that recommended taxing Internet e-mail to fund development projects, saying the organization has no plans to impose such a tax nor the power to do so.
The U.N. Development Program, which commissioned the report, issued a statement Thursday saying it ''neither advocates nor supports any so-called global tax, nor any other form of international levy, as a means of funding development aid.''
The suggestion to consider imposing a ''bit-tax'' on e-mail was contained in the 262-page annual Human Development Report released Monday.
The report suggested a host of ideas to try to narrow the widening gap between rich and poor countries that has accompanied technological advances in recent years.
Calls for the tax, however, sparked the ire of U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, who criticized the suggestion as a wrongheaded attempt to spread the reach of the Internet to those in the developing world.
''U.S. taxpayer dollars should not be used to support U.N. reports pushing this kind of redistribution policy,'' Army wrote in a letter Wednesday to his colleagues in the House.
The U.N. Development Program statement said the report is an independent publication that has separate editorial policies from those of the U.N. agency.
''It looks we caught them with their hand in the cookie jar, but we got to them before they could take a bite out of the cookie,'' said Armey spokesman Jim Wilkinson.
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