Dirt Diggers Digest No. 81

November 15, 2007

It has been a longer interval than usual since the last issue of the Digest. That's because your editor has been busy with the completion of two reports that should be of interest to corporate researchers. This issue will highlight those reports.

Today the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, headed by Digest editor Philip Mattera, is releasing The State of State Disclosure: An Evaluation of Online Public Information About Economic Development Subsidies, Procurement Contracts and Lobbying Activities. The report assesses the quantity and quality of data made available on state government websites in three critical areas of interaction between the public and private sectors.

The state websites are rated on criteria such as the ease of finding the site online; the ability to search for data on a specific company; the level of detail provided; the thoroughness of the data; and the currency of the data. The full text of the report and supplementary material--including complete sets of links to disclosure websites--can be found at www.goodjobsfirst.org/statedisclosure.cfm. Click here for a summary of how the states are scored and ranked in each of the three categories and overall.

While a few states receive a very high score in one or two of the categories, none does so in all three. Only four states receive an overall grade of B or B- while 27 states and the District of Columbia rate an F. The following sections give more details on the results for each of the three categories of disclosure examined.

The reason why the overall average scores of many states is so low is the dismal condition of subsidy transparency. Only 23 states have any form of online subsidy disclosure at all, and in those states the reporting is usually far from adequate. Most states report only on the estimated cost of the subsidy at the time it is awarded, while only a handful provide data on outcomes, i.e. how many jobs the recipient company actually created and the quality of those jobs in terms of wage rates, benefits, etc.

The best online subsidy disclosure can be found in Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota, but even these states could use significant improvement. Seven states (Hawaii, Louisiana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas) will soon have improved subsidy reporting thanks to new disclosure initiatives that will take effect over the next year.

Click here to get to a hyperlinked list of state subsidy disclosure websites. For details on what those sites cover (and how they were scored in the report), go to the state appendices.

State reporting on procurement contracts is much more developed than on subsidy disclosure. Every state aside from Minnesota currently provides at least some online information about contracts--and Minnesota will soon join the rest.

About 16 states are rated at 90-95 percent in the report and thus get a grade of A-. Apart from Minnesota, three states--Kentucky, Rhode Island, Wyoming--get a grade of F. The higher scores are given to states whose sites can be easily searched by vendor name, cover a wider range of contracts and provide access to more data on vendors and to the full texts of contracts.

Click here to get to a hyperlinked list of state contract disclosure websites. For details on what those sites cover (and how they were scored in the report), go to the state appendices.

Every state and the District of Columbia provide at least some online information on lobbyists and their activities, but there is wide variation in the quality of that reporting. Some states such as Alabama, South Carolina and West Virginia have mere rosters of lobbyists. Twelve states and DC are given a grade of F.

At the other end, a few states such as Wisconsin have outstanding sites that provide detailed data on lobbyists, their corporate clients, and the specific issues or bills on which the lobbyists were asked to work--and how much they were paid.

Click here to get to a hyperlinked list of state lobbying disclosure websites. For details on what those sites cover (and how they were scored in the report), go to the state appendices.

The Corporate Research Project report offers a set of policy options that states can use to improve their transparency, both in terms of format and content. As for format, the report suggests that sites make it possible both to browse through complete lists of subsidy and contract recipients, for example, as well as to zero in with a search of a particular company name. Another recommendation is to include Application Programming Interfaces, so the data can be easily imported by other websites.

For subsidies and contracts, we urge states to expand reporting both on the track record of the recipients (environmental and labor compliance, etc.) and on outcomes. In the latter area, Colorado took a big step forward this year by passing legislation that will require contract reporting to include data on the criteria used to choose the vendor, the number of jobs created by the project and the number of public employees (if any) displaced by the contract, and the portion of the work performed outside the United States (with an explanation of why it had to be done offshore).

Another recent innovation occurred in Illinois, where State Comptroller Dan Hynes unveiled a site called Open Book that combines information on contractors with data on state campaign contributions. The state appendices in the Corporate Research Project report list all those places where new transparency programs have been adopted.

The other report recently released by Digest editor Philip Mattera and his colleagues at Good Jobs First is called Rolling Back Property Tax Payments: How Wal-Mart Short-Changes Schools and Other Public Services by Challenging Its Property Tax Assessments. This is a detailed look at how the giant retailer seeks to minimize its tax payments to the U.S. communities in which it operates. It complements revelations by the Wall Street Journal earlier this year about the company's state income tax avoidance as well as the previous work of Good Jobs First about Wal-Mart's widespread receipt of tax breaks and other subsidies under the banner of economic development.

The new report documents hundreds of instances in which Wal-Mart has attempted to get its local property tax bill reduced by challenging the value put on its stores and distribution centers by public assessors. In addition to being displayed in the detailed appendix in the report itself, all the data have been added to our Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch website and thus can be easily searched by city, state, county, etc.

To mark the fifth anniversary of the creation of the Bush Administration's Corporate Fraud Task Force, Law.com has created what it calls a Corporate Fraud Data Base. Calling it a database may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it is a useful compilation of information on several dozen prosecutions that the task force identified as being among the most significant it handled.

A group of public-interest watchdog groups have created a website called Government Documents that invites anyone to join in the process of reading and analyzing hundreds of thousands of pages of federal documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests or other forms of disclosure. Users are asked (after registering) to review documents--such as CIA Inspector General Reports (submitted by the Project On Government Oversight) and litigation materials relating to government surveillance (submitted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation)--to determine their significance. It's possible to browse through the documents before signing on as a citizen reviewer.

A similar approach is being taken by the TobaccoWiki, a collaborative effort to "mine the millions of pages of previously-secret, internal tobacco industry documents now posted on the Internet. The purpose of Tobaccowiki is to make it easier to find information about tobacco industry behavior, and to reveal what has been learned about the industry through its documents." The documents being analyzed are those in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.

OMB Watch reports that California has become the first state to enact legislation that undoes the effect of the steps taken last year by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency's to weaken reporting requirements under the Toxics Release Inventory. The California bill (AB 833) puts the reporting threshold for companies in the state back to 500 pounds of a listed toxic chemical. The EPA had increased the level to 2,000 pounds.

Meanwhile in Washington, efforts to undo the EPA's actions at the federal level seem to be stalled, but the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on the issue last month during which several witnesses criticized the EPA's action as being detrimental to the cause of environmental justice.

NOZA, a website that allows you to search a compilation of philanthropic information (see Digest No.71), has announced that it is now providing free access to the portion of its database dealing with foundation grants, which is said to have about 800,000 entries. Basic searching within the 25 million records for donations by individuals and corporations is also free, but there is a charge for displaying full records for these search results.