Earlier this week Integrity Action’s Fredrik Galtung launched his working paper ‘The Fix-Rate: A Key Metric for Transparency and Accountability’ (PDF). Yesterday my colleague Lee Drutman and I had an interesting conversation about this work with Fredrik, and I wanted to share some thoughts about the Fix-Rate.

With this paper Fredrik and Integrity Action take the position that the anecdote-heavy evidence base linking transparency and accountability interventions needs some more concrete measures. To that end, ‘Fix-Rate’ proposes a metric for measuring impacts, and offers examples of its use in a variety of national and municipal contexts, largely focusing on improvements in public service provisioning and infrastructure projects.

NEWS:

• U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declined to say whether there would be a review of the Department of Justice procedures on searching journalists' records. DOJ has been under scrutiny after the AP revealed the Department had seized more than two months of phone records. (NPR)
• The White House is pushing for a media shield bill that would protect reporters from certain penalties for not revealing confidential sources, among other things. (New York Times)
• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said the Senate is working to confirm a commissioner for the IRS, which has lacked a confirmed head since November. (Roll Call)
• The acting commissioner of the IRS resigned on Wednesday at the request of President Obama, several days after an audit revealed the IRS targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny. (Washington Post)

You're invited to attend a Transparency Happy Hour on Wednesday, May 22, from 5:30-7:30 at Bullfeathers, in Washington, D.C. Join advocates, activists, academics, and staffers for an evening of fun... and the opportunity to unwind after the day's Legislative Data and Transparency Conference!

Public officials are elected or appointed to do the people's business, but what happens to transparency when they do that business through private channels? There have been cases across the country revolving around public officials using private methods of communication -- like personal email accounts or cell phones -- to conduct public business. When citizens request to know more about business done by their representatives, these private communications have, at times, served as blocks to the public's right to access information. As some of these cases are being decided in courts, we've seen a wide variety of responses from state and local governments about how to handle this public records issue.

In Alaska, such a case made it all the way to that state's Supreme Court. A citizen questioned the practice of former Governor Sarah Palin using a personal email account to conduct public business. Alaska's Supreme Court decided that if the state's employees use personal email for public business, those records must be made available to the public.

At least one government body on the other side of the country reached a similar conclusion about the value of keeping public business in the public record. The Washington, D.C., council voted to require members and employees to conduct public business on their public accounts. This move came after an open government group sued the council for not sharing public business done on personal accounts. The Mayor has also directed government employees to stay away from using personal email accounts for official business.

Not all government bodies are moving toward requiring this kind of disclosure, unfortunately.

NEWS:

• As questions grow about why the U.S. Department of Justice secretly obtained two months of phone records from AP journalists, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he was not the one to authorize the seizure. (The Hill)
• The SEC is considering whether publicly-traded corporations should have to disclose their political spending to shareholders. (The Hill)
• Senior executive, legislative, and judicial branch officials will have to fill out  personal finance reports by May 15. (Roll Call)
• Documents show it wasn't just staff in the IRS Cincinnati office who knew conservative groups were targeted for scrutiny -- details of the actions appear to have reached higher-ups in the agency by mid-2012. (Washington Post)

As part of our recent procurement initiative, I've been playing around with the data present in FedBizOpps, ( or FBO.gov) -- it’s the single point of entry for posting all government solicitations, award notices, and various other informational notices regarding government contracts. In short, all contracts awarded must be reported here. What is immediately striking is that the number of awards posted to FedBizOpps does not come even remotely close to the number of awards in USASpending.gov -- the database that tracks contract spending. FedBizOpps reports a mere 8,138 contracts awarded for 2012, while USASpending reports 178,375 contract awards for that same year.

Common sense tells us that the number of contracts in each database should match. The fact that they don’t is a mystery at the moment, but the problem could be due to broadly defined exceptions, or even poor reporting and oversight as we've seen in other cases involving government reporting. In order to see specifics in the data and run an analysis, I extracted the data into a postgresql database. The data source I used is an XML file on fbo.gov's FTP server, which seems to include data from the last 13 years.

The White House's new Open Data Policy has received many accolades, but its ability to be sustained long term will depend on support from the legislative branch. Fortunately, Congress has been working on these issues for the last several years.

NEWS:

• Responding to Friday's news that the IRS targeted conservative groups for more scrutiny, President Obama called for those responsible to be held accountable for the "outrageous" action. (Washington Post)
• House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi used the recent news about the IRS to make a point about her desire to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and change the campaign finance system. (Roll Call)
• Obama's advocacy group Organizing for Action has so far, despite nearly $5 million in fundraising and ties to the White House, failed to make a significant mark on federal policy. (Washington Post)

Lost in the widening scandal over the IRS targeting of conservative political groups: The fact that most of them were not the big political players of 2012.

The IRS’s admission that it targeted groups with conservative sounding names for scrutiny will no doubt be held up by some as “proof” that the agency can’t be trusted with determining whether organizations claiming to be “social welfare” organizations are actually political organizations in disguise. In fact, just the opposite is true. The agency needs to apply clear and unequivocally neutral rules to its determinations about whether a group is in fact a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, entitled to tax exempt status but not required to disclose its donors, or whether it is a political organization, also entitled to tax exempt status but not allowed to keep its donors secret. Using a shortcut, like whether a group had the word “tea party” or “patriot” in its name to aid in making that determination is dead wrong for an agency that must be scrupulously nonpartisan.