FYI: The effort to determine how much of the over $21 billion in promised federal 9/11 aid New York is actually getting is doomed, says the U.S. General Accounting Office, because the IRS isn’t even collecting data on how many people are claiming the Liberty Zone tax credits. As part of the White House’s promised relief package, the IRS made available $5 billion for seven different types of tax credits for commercial and residential development. But these benefit programs are not the sort for which the IRS normally collects and reports usage data, and as a result the agency has no indication of how much of the $5 billion the city is actually getting. In July, the city’s Independent Budget Office also issued a report broadly tracking the recovery money, concluding that the city and state have been fully reimbursed for clean-up costs but saying that the remaining aid for long-term growth is more difficult to monitor. [10/7/03]