.My guest is the Honorable Joseph DioGuardi, who represented Westchester County in Congress in the middle 1980’s. Our subject on April 15th, known to all Americans as Tax Day, is the viability of the American financial system and can we afford to continue on America’s current path of “tax and spend” and survive economically.

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Joe DioGuardi was raised in the Bronx, New York, where he graduated from Fordham Prep in 1958 and Fordham University with honors in 1962. His late father, who immigrated to America in 1929, was an ethnic Albanian who was born in Greci, the oldest Albanian-speaking village in Italy and his mother is a first-generation Italian American who was born in New York City. Before coming to Congress, DioGuardi was a practicing CPA who served twenty-two years with the international accounting firm of Arthur Andersen & Co., twelve of them as a partner. In 1984, he became the first practicing certified public accountant ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In addition to his human rights work while in Congress, DioGuardi took the lead in sounding the call for federal financial reform. After leaving Congress, he established a nonpartisan foundation, Truth in Government, and published a book entitled Unaccountable Congress: It Doesn’t Add Up.

DioGuardi currently serves on the board of directors of several private and publicly-held U.S. corporations. Joseph DioGuardi was the first Member of Congress to bring the issue of Albanian rights in the Balkans to the attention of the U.S. government through a Congressional Resolution that he sponsored as a new Member in 1986. He was also responsible for the first Congressional hearing on Kosova in 1987. He has made more than thirty trips to the Balkans since leaving Congress in 1989 in his capacity as the founding, volunteer president of the Albanian American Civic League. As the president of the Albanian American Civic League, DioGuardi has worked with members on both sides of the political aisle in an effort to bring lasting peace and stability to the Southeast Europe.