A pair of recent investigations into transparency and accountability found most state governments still fell short in making public information more readily accessible, with Illinois receiving only average grades for its own efforts.

The reports – released last month by government watchdog groups – revealed that while state governments across the country as a whole had improved their efforts to become more open in their disclosures, many were still lacking in providing either the kinds of laws or practices necessary to reduce the risk of corruption among state agencies and elected officials.

The “State Integrity Investigation”, is a first-of-its-kind analysis produced jointly by Global Integrity, the Center for Public Integrity and Public Radio International that measured the risk for corruption in each of the country’s 50 state governments based on their current ethics laws and the resources in place to make sure those laws are enforced.

Among the states receiving the highest grades for integrity were New Jersey, which received the highest score of 87 out of 100, followed by Connecticut with 86, Washington with 83, California with 81 and Nebraska at 80. No state received a perfect grade mark, i.e. an “A”.  

A total of eight states received failing marks for their efforts to maintain government integrity, among them were Michigan, North Dakota, South Carolina, Maine, Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota and Georgia, which was ranked the worst.

Perhaps surprisingly - given the many past and more recent scandals involving elected officials such as former Gov. George Ryan, his successor Gov. Rod Blagojevich and most recently the arrest last month of 10th District State Rep. Derrick Smith (D-Chicago) on bribery charges – Illinois received a grade of “C” according to the investigation’s report, ranking it tenth for its efforts to curb corruption.

Conversely, a number of states with relatively little history of political corruption were ranked at the bottom. Ginley said a state’s experience with political scandal may have a direct correlation to the strength of its ethics reform efforts.

“I think that anytime you look at successful ethics reform at the state level it usually comes out of a scandal, or it’s usually sparked by some sort of high-profile political scandal,” said Caitlin Ginley, project manager for the State Integrity Investigation. “A lot of times, the way that these laws get passed comes from an outcry from the public, it comes from a demand not just within government, but from the people being aware that there are things that they would like to change – without that push, it’s very hard sometimes for those laws to be taken up.” 

While the report gave Illinois high marks in such areas as its internal auditing, and a fair grade when it came to making public information accessible, the state received low scores for its legislative accountability and a failing grade when it came to the openness of its redistricting process - an issue that has been a source of contention among lawmakers for the past year when state Democrats remapped congressional districts to include more democratic voters within areas that were once regarded as Republican strongholds.

Overall, the report found the area of greatest concern for nearly every state had to with their ethics enforcement efforts, which in many cases Ginley said were not strong enough even in states where tougher laws were already in place.

“The laws might be there but they’re not either effectively implemented or they’re being enforced incorrectly,” said.  “I think that might have to do with either the ways the laws are written – they can be very vague and so they can be very difficult to enforce – I also think what we saw was just sort of a real lack of funding or resources or staffing behind this.”

Ginley deduced the current trend among governments to cut funding for public services in order to address their budget concerns was most likely the reason why many agencies responsible for overseeing the regulation of state ethics laws were found to lack the proper resources to truly be effective.

“I think that states are struggling financially, and so a lot of times the first step might be slashing the budget or staffing of the ethics agency because that’s not usually as much of a priority as jobs and healthcare and education,” Ginley said. “So that’s where I see a lot of these problems stemming from.”  

Information for the State Integrity Investigation was obtained through the work of journalists who graded each state on its risks of corruption by using a criteria consisting of more than 300 measures within 14 different categories, which covered a variety of topics, such as ethics, campaign finance laws and pension fund management.

While Illinois was regarded as only being average when it came to its anti-corruption efforts, the state did fare slightly better when it came to its openness regarding how taxpayer dollars were being spent, according to the Illinois Public Interest Research Group’s report, “Following the Money 2012: How the States Rank on Providing Online Access to Government Spending Data”.

The report conducted an analysis of 46 states, looking specifically at how easily information on government spending – such as state contracts and budgets - was found on state-run websites.

“Illinois has improved each year – there’s obviously room for improvement,” said Illinois PIRG State Director Brian Imus. “There’s much more the state can do to make sure taxpayers know exactly where our tax dollars are going.”

This marked the third annual year for the report, which Imus felt shed light on an important and relatively inexpensive step state governments could take toward curbing corruption.

“We’re [Illinois] really in the middle of the pack in terms of how well we’re doing providing this type of information online compared to many of the other states,” Imus said. “I think though in a state that has a huge budget problem and a history of corruption, transparency is a place where we can actually address those problems.”   

The report gave Illinois a grade of B-,  while other states including Texas, Kentucky Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Arizona, were the highest scorers. Unlike the State Integrity Investigation, where links were found between a state’s scandalous political history and its effort to implement ethics reform, Imus said no such clear-cut connections were discovered to explain why some states fared better than others.

“It’s not easy to find some obvious link about why one state is doing better than another or if there is some sort of trend out there,” Imus said. “Texas is a state that is pretty conservative and they’re one of the top–ranked states.”

The report did cite Illinois as being the only state that provided information on both the projected benefits and actual benefits created from economic development subsidies, but said the state had not done enough over the past year to make more of its information available online.

“I think that the concept of transparency 2.0 is still relatively new,” Imus said. “It’s not a partisan issue, it’s just something that some states have grabbed onto and recognized it makes a lot of sense and that it’s very popular with the public, and other states are further behind in catching up and recognizing that this is something that they should be doing.”

Imus said as a whole, governments throughout the country had made strides over the past couple of years toward providing online access to government spending information, with 46 states now offering an online database to government expenditures – compared to 32 states two years ago.

In spite of current state budgetary constraints, Imus said providing greater online accessibility can prove to be a cost-effective measure.

“There is measurable savings that result from making this information much more transparent,” Imus said. “So in the long-run, this is a budget plus for states when they’re doing it and doing it well.”

For its part, some state lawmakers have taken steps toward providing greater online transparency. Most recently, the Illinois House passed a bill that would require the state’s Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to post on its website the names of businesses that had failed to meet certain obligations as part of their agreement to receive state economic development funding and were now required to pay back those monies. The bill is currently awaiting a vote in the Illinois Senate.

The bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Kelly Burke (D-Oak Lawn), said the purpose was to provide the public with an explanation of why a company may have failed to meet its obligations after receiving taxpayer funds.

“It think it’s what people expect and it’s what people should have because it’s the taxpayers’ money and they should know what it’s being used for and, hopefully, see that it’s being used wisely,” Burke said. “With the ability to post this on the internet, it’s just so much easier to be transparent because it’s easily accessible to people and there’s a format already in place – the infrastructure is already in place, so why not be as transparent as we possibly can?”