The White House blog recently wrote about Obama's trip to India and mentioned that US-based organizations could learn from Indian organizations using technology to improve accountability and transparency. I agreed. Now is a great time for the US government to recognize that there are  transparency policies all over the world that we Americans could implement or, at a bare minimum, learn from. Here are just a few foreign governments that have policies we wish would improve what we have state-side:

You get a dataset! And you get a dataset! Everyone gets a dataset!

There is always progress to be made and the presumption to make data public and online (with teeth!) is an important cultural shift we hope to see soon. Just last week the United Kingdom took an unprecedented step to publicize all government spending over 25,0000 pounds. As governments around the world tighten their belts we think making the books fully transparent will allow citizens to be better informed about where their tax dollars go and how to move forward. Here in the US there is the Data.gov site (which could be greatly improved) and we are encouraged that the culture is shifting as we see folks like the United Nations, the World Bank, Russia, Spain, Finland, Australia and many others hopping on board.

Publicly Funded Research Papers Available to the Public

The Congressional Research Service, often referred to as 'Congress' think tank', is a well-respected non-partisan branch of the Library of Congress that regularly publishes reports exclusively for members of Congress and their staff at a budget over $100 million. The Sunlight Foundation and others have long advocated for these reports to be public (meaning online), but they remain inaccessible to the general public.

Many foreign governments have publicly-funded think tanks similar to CRS, but they make the reports free to the public and accessible online. The United Kingdom has the House of Commons Library Research Papers, Canada has a nice list with categories on the site of their Library of Parliament Research Publications, and Australia publishes their reports (going back to 1993!) on the Parliament of Australia's Parliamentary Library website. Australia even has official research reports published on the state level by the websites of Victoria and New South Wales.

Imagine that.

Creating Better Disclosure Surrounding Resource Management

The US could learn a thing or two from other resource-rich countries about disclosing online searchable production, leases, costs, audits, and safety reports. This important non-proprietary information keeps the public informed about the safety and financial status of our natural resources. We hope the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) that replaced the Minerals Management Service (MMS) will take the necessary steps that many countries have already taken to improve online reporting in this sector.

The Revenue Watch Institute and Transparency International recently rated the top 41 oil, gas and mineral producing countries countries in terms of their government disclosure record [pdf link]. The United States came in at 11th place, behind Russia, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Ecuador and others. This ranking assessed revenue transparency more than safety records, but it is an important metric to recognize how much the US government could continue to learn. Let's see less of this and more online disclosure like Angola.

Expanding and Enriching Visitor Logs

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has a portion of the official website dedicated to transparency initiatives including some substantive items that we would love to see in the US. We appreciate what the White House has done with releasing visitor logs, but a glance across the pond shows that Number 10 is posting details of meetings, hospitality, gifts and overseas travel across all departments and high level staff. Impressive stuff when you compare it to the White House offerings.

Online Disclosure Forms

The Australian equivalent of the Federal Election Commission, known down under as the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), has a great online system to research financial documents relating to the elections.  It includes a nice financial disclosure and donor search function that is quite similar to the FEC version (both obviously don't hold a candle to Sunlight's illuminative version), but after some more research I discovered that they allow those who have to file* to do so through disclosure forms online!  We didn't venture beyond the sleek registration page, but it gave us goosebumps to see other countries approaching our vision of real-time online disclosure. We would like to see this type of online filing possible for lobbying, elections or even meetings - it would certainly ease the eyes of our reporters who often have to dig through .pdf image files.

• In Australia the political system requires candidates and Senate groups, registered political parties and their associated entities, and donors and third parties to lodge disclosure returns. Swoon!

It would be impossible to ignore that each country listed in the items above has a unique political system, but these examples serve as great starting points for policies that could work here, now. The Sunlight Foundation will continue to encourage dialogue on these important issues and hope that the US government learns from non-profits and governments all over the world.

What would happen here in the States if congressmen were revealed to have used their office allowances (Member's Representational Allowance) on XXX-rated tapes, digging a moat around their McMansion, or paying down a mortgage that had already been paid off? It wouldn't be too different from how the British are reacting right now. Members of Parliament (MPs) have been discovered using their personal allowances on the above mentioned items and more (in Britain, however, they do not have McMansions, they actually have castles) and the people are wicked angry. The scandal has already claimed the Speaker of the House of Commons and almost a dozen MPs, who have promised not to run for office again.

The Wikipedia page on the MP expense scandal provides a fairly detailed primer to introduce yourself to the peculiar purchasing peccadillos of Members of Parliament. In short, this all began when an intrepid indepedent journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the expense account information. Parliament refused and filed numerous appeals, losing each time. Eventually, Parliament stated that they would release the expense information to the full public in July of 2009, but they would redact certain information -- that information turned out to be the juiciest stuff. Before that month could come (we are still in May), the Daily Telegraph obtained a full, unredacted list of MP expenses and began running stories exposing the various outrages that MPs expensed on the government dime. And it has all tumbled out of control from there.

In some ways, we've seen similar scandals here in the United States. In the early 1990s, there were two concurrent scandals related to the House Bank and the House Post Office. The House banking scandal involved lawmakers -- practically every single one of them -- kiting checks and going months with huge overdrafts on their accounts. The House Post Office scandal saw lawmakers purchasing stamps with their Member's Representational Allowance (MRA) and then trading them back to the Post Office for cash. The House banking scandal led to the conviction of four former lawmakers and a short scolding of 22 lawmakers by the House Ethics Committee. The House Post Office scandal led to the conviction of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, one of the last of the congressional bulls, for laundering money through stamps, hiring "ghost" employees, and using MRA funds for personal uses.

Rostenkowski may be the most famous of House lawmakers to be taken down, like the MP expense scandal, by misuse of office funds, but he is certainly not the only one. In the 1970s, Rep. Wayne Hays, chairman of the House Adminsitration Committee, was felled after it was revealed that he kept his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, on his congressional payroll as a secretary despite, in her own words, that, "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone!" During the Hays scandal coverage, a similar situation was uncovered with Rep. John Young .

Whether it is the MP scandal, Rostenkowski, or Hays, it is obvious the one thing that abets these kinds of abuses is a serious lack of transparency. Had all of these expense funds and allowances been accessible to the public any person would reason that they could not easily get away with abuse or misuse of the funds. Preempting actions by making the item of potential abuse transparent prevents the actions from being made.

Despite this obvious case for transparency in office funds, congressional "Statements of Expenditures" (how the MRA is spent by each individual office) are still no where to be found on the Internet. They are printed up in a series of books (really, a lot of books) and never placed near a computer, scanner, or anything that would allow you to see them, save a trip to the basement of the Longworth House Office Building.

Last year, Sunlight's Lisa Rosenberg endorsed the idea of online disclosure for the "Statements of Expenditures" writing, "[W]e would like to see the “Statements of Expenditures” required by law to be made public by the House and Senate to be put online by each of the legislative bodies. ... Failing to make disbursement reports available online gives them an air of secrecy that is largely unwarranted given the uncontroversial content of the reports."