Delaware Gets a C- on the Corruption Risk Report Card

The State Integrity Investigation has conducted a year-long study of the effectiveness (or even existence) of each state’s laws and operating procedures in place to deter corruption and promote government accountability and openness. This report is done and published as of yesterday (19 March 2012) and Delaware gets an overall grade of C-, ranked #22 in terms of least corruption risk out of all 50 states. The state that came in the best? That would be New Jersey, with a grade of B+. Take a look at Delaware’s report card:

This is a real mixed bag for Delaware — we scored well in Internal Auditing, Budget Processes and in Judicial Accountability. We scored very badly in Lobbying Disclosure, Public Access to Information, Political Financing, Insurance Commissions, and Ethics Enforcement. And these areas where we didn’t score well are interesting to me, since many of these topics are recurring themes of discussion here at DL with respect to state government.

You can see what went into the score and the scoring criteria for each of these items — you need to go to the Delaware Report Card link, and click on each report card line item. That data will display at each of those links.

For Public Access to Information, we scored very well by having laws that both guarantee access to government information and provide a way to appeal decisions that deny you that access. It was the lack of a legal, formal process of requesting information and the lack of an oversight entity for making sure that the public gets its information in some rational process that brought our score down alot. Lobbying Disclosure (F) scores low across the board, as you might expect, and in the main result from have weak/non-existent disclosures or law enforcement. Political Financing (F) was graded down largely because of the lack of auditing (accountability) and lack of effectiveness of the established laws in governing the financing of candidates and PACs. We were graded down for lack or or weak regulations governing conflicts of interest and for a weak effectiveness of the ethics laws we have in the Ethics (D-) category. Legislative Accountability (D-) was graded down for the lack of/or weak regulations governing conflicts of interest for members of the legislature and for the lack of an effective enforcement mechanism for those regulations. State Insurance Commissions was graded down (D) because Delawareans cannot see asset disclosure records of the insurance commission, weak or nonexistent laws for public disclosure of records and spotty disclosure practices of the office. There’s lots more at the link, so be sure to go see it.

One of the interesting things about this report is that this project recruited a local reporter in each state to survey the laws, regulations and policies and then analyze how well these work in terms of deterring corruption. So that should mean that the information from each state should have been reported by someone who is close to the ground on these issues. For Delaware, the reporter who did this work was Cris Barrish, and his summary of the investigation he did is here. He makes the point that this very small state and there is a small group of people moving between government, local coporations and lobbying firms makes the whole business seem awfully opaque:

Lawmakers and the political and corporate elite often brag about the Delaware Way of solving problems in a nonpartisan, collaborative way. That same Delaware Way, however, also tends to maintain a status quo because power is concentrated in the hands of a core group of politicians who sometimes stay in office for decades, and business executives in banking, development and other major industries.

Like in most states, you are never going to completely prevent the corrupt or the immoral from taking office or even being in government. But a strong set of laws and regulations with a really good enforcement or auditing function can help make the box smaller for these kind of folks to operate in and certainly helps taxpayers to see what is going on so that they might take their place in the process by demanding answers for questionable behavior and actions. While I think that Jack Markell has made a real difference in opening up much of the state government and at least streamlining the rules for getting FOIA requests done AND in improving the information available on the website, it is time to embrace some tougher reforms — like lobbying reform.

Kudos to the State Integrity Investigation project and to Cris Barrish for bringing Government Accountability and Openess back into the conversation — especially this election season.

What jumps out at you from this report? And what is the most important thing Delaware could do to improve its responsiveness to its citizens?