Integrity report to shed light on how open Iowa government is

UPDATED MONDAY, MARCH 19: Go here for the State Integrity Investigation story that ran in The Gazette. The IowaWatch.org story is here.

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The Monday, March 19, copy of The Gazette will report a new national study of the safeguards states have in place to fight corruption in state government. Called the State Integrity Investigation, the study looks at the rules and practices state governments have in place for ensuring that the risk for corruption in those governments is minimized.

The study, led by the Center for Public Integrity, examines:

--  State laws that govern our access to public information, political financing, executive accountability, legislative accountability, judicial accountability, the budget process, civil service management, procurement, internal auditing, lobbying disclosure, state pension fund management, ethics enforcement agencies, state insurance commissions, and redistricting.

--  How effective these laws and institutions are when it comes to actual practices.

--  How accessible the laws and institutions are to citizens.

Of particular interest will be something the Center for Public Integrity calls the enforcement gap. That is the difference between the system and laws a state establishes and how well they are enforced.

The report will follow one released Wednesday that graded states on an A-to-F scale on how transparent their spending information is online. Iowa got a big, fat “F” in that U.S. Public Interest Research Group report so it figures that people who watch government will be interested in Monday's report. The new report also will have some letter grades.

The Gazette and the Iowa City-based, non-profit Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism collaborated on the Iowa portion of the Center for Public Integrity study. Reporters from both Iowa news organizations spent a great deal of time during the last half of 2011 getting answers to specific questions crafted by the Center for Public Integrity and using a guide to give numerical scores to those answers.

We were glad to take part in this study. One hope out of it is that any gaps in the system already in place and how that system is used can be closed with greater awareness.

Questions were designed to answer larger ones, such as, “Do citizens have a legal right to access of information,” “Are lobbyists required to disclose spending?” and “Is the state redistricting process open and transparent?” Numerical scores were based on the notion that a “yes” answer was worth 100 points, a “no” was worth 0 and qualifying information could generate scores of 25, 50 or 75, depending upon the question.

The national center did follow-up research using comments, references, interviews and peer review of the initial answers to arrive at final grades. It was exhaustive work requiring more hours than originally expected but we feel we have a good measure of all of these categories to tell you about on March 19.

In all, 16,500 indicators were compiled nationwide, covering 61 areas of focus in the 14 main categories listed at the beginning of this column in order to create something called corruption risk indicators. The goal of having indicators, the Center for Public Integrity states, is “to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of the medicine applied against corruption in each state – openness, transparency, and accountability – rather than the disease of corruption itself.”

A link to the complete investigation methodology can be found here.

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. whose mission is “to reveal abuses of power, corruption and dereliction of duty by powerful public and private institutions in order to cause them to operate with honesty, integrity, accountability and to put the public interest first.” It was founded by

Charles Lewis, 58, executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication and a former news producer for ABC News and CBS News' “60 Minutes.”