Partial/Omitted Information – no state publishes budget amounts versus actual spending levels;
Confusing presentation – State so-called transparency efforts are difficult to understand and virtually useless to find real information. Some are visually appealing, but communicate very little;
Subjective/baseless evaluation – without an objective standard from which to assess state, any assessments are perceived as arbitrary, and partisan in nature, and at best they are ignored.
State transparency reporting is currently at the mercy of elected officials. For example, California Governor Jerry Brown, in Executive Order B-12-11, declared his support for transparency in the same notice he announced his was closing the state’s consolidated transparency web site. Californians are now relegated to searching through literally thousands of web pages (without an index) to find any lingering transparency information scattered among government web sites, buried in millions of web pages across the internet.
