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.
Continue readingTangled web: The IRS role in campaign finance
With the burgeoning scandal about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) singling out small conservative nonprofit groups for scrutiny, upcoming hearings, and a Justice Department investigation, the public is getting a quick schooling in the byzantine ways tax exempt "social welfare" groups get involved in the political game.
A long list of nonprofit groups spend big on politics. They run the gamut from well known organizations of long standing, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to Crossroads GPS, the brainchild of Republican strategist Karl Rove. As reported in the New York Times, even as it was apparently targeting small Tea ...
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 5/15/2013
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) Continue reading
Over 170k Award Notices Missing From FedBizOpps
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.
Continue readingThe White House, Congress, and Open Data Policy
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.
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 5/14/2013
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) Continue reading
IRS creates big stir targeting small fry
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.
Continue readingIRS Debacle Shows Need for Clearer, not Fewer Rules
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.
Continue readingDid almost 600 donors break campaign finance law in 2012?
As many as 600 individuals appear to have exceeded the $117,000 that they were legally allowed to give directly to federal candidates, political parties and political committees in the last election cycle, records examined by the Sunlight Foundation suggest. But our most troubling finding may how difficult it is determine with legal certainty exactly how many campaign scofflaws there are, or how much over the limit they gave. Like our former Sunlight colleagues, Paul Blumenthal and Aaron Bycoffe of the Huffington Post, we have been curious about the number of donors who appear to have exceeded campaign spending limits, in an era when the Supreme Court has made it possible for wealthy individuals to give in unlimited amounts via super PACs. In addition to those who violated the overall limit for giving to federal campaigns, we identified as many as 1,478 individuals who may have given more than the legal limit of $70,800 to parties and committees and 507 who appear to have given more than the $46,200 legal aggregate limit to individual candidates.
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 5/13/2013
NEWS:
- An audit shows the IRS gave more scrutiny to conservative groups or groups that criticized the government. The high-level decisions were made out of a Cincinnati field office. (Washington Post)
- Sheldon Adelson, who poured money into the 2012 elections, may be preparing to spend millions of dollars on the 2014 elections if his recent transfer of money from a super PAC to a non-profit is any indicator. (Roll Call)
- A user-friendly and restriction-free version of Maryland's code of Public Laws is available online and ready to be worked on by developers. (TechPresident) Continue reading
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