Everything the Vermont Department of Taxes produced on November 3, 2026 in response to the Gazette's public records request about Commissioner Bill Shouldice's election-week commentary.
The request went to the Department on October 30, 2026 under the Vermont Public Records Act, 1 V.S.A. §§ 315–320. The Department answered on the evening of November 3 with two emails holding 49 files, said 54 items were intended, withheld one record as attorney-client privileged, and said more records were under review until November 13.
What is published here is the whole production with four alterations, each listed in the index: a personal cell-phone number in one Teams screenshot is blacked out and the same string is replaced in every transcript; mail-routing headers are removed from the .eml files, because one carried a sender's home IP address; in the text renderings, Outlook tracking wrappers are unwrapped and SharePoint sharing links are cut at their per-recipient token; and three non-office phone numbers in staff signature blocks are replaced. Nothing else is changed. A SHA-256 hash of every published file is in the index.
Forwarded emails appear twice, as the original .eml with its attachments and as a plain-text rendering. The two cover emails appear as text only, because the originals embed the unredacted Word file. The 29 screenshots pasted into the Word file "Op Ed Group - Teams Chat.docx" are listed one by one, in document order.
The story these records support: A week before the election, the tax commissioner cherry-picked his numbers →
Plain index: INDEX.md · index.json. Every file carries its SHA-256 hash in the index.