Years of Debate and Still no Online Access to Disclosure Forms

Virginia legislators have been kicking around the idea of putting financial disclosure statements online since 1992. Yet 17 years later, nobody’s gotten around to it.

That, along with a laundry list of other deficiencies, is why Virginia failed the Center for Public Integrity’s 2009 grading of state-by-state financial disclosure laws.

It was not a graceful failure – it’s a bumbling belly-flop among the most dramatic in the study’s history, with the commonwealth falling from 8th place to 31st over the course of a decade.

“Virginia stayed stagnant while the majority of states moved forward,” said Steve Carpinelli, media relations manager for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit research group based in Washington. “There’s a trend to move these records online, really make them publicly accessible. Virginia’s not doing that.”

At last count, 29 states, including Tennessee, make disclosure forms electronically available, providing access to anybody with a computer and a little curiosity.

In Virginia, they’re stored away in clerks’ offices across the state, seen, on average, by three people a year including the person who fills them out.

Still, some suggest that the primary way disclosure laws are effective is a public awareness of their existence.

“Its strength lies in its deterrent effect,” said Roy Evans, commonwealth’s attorney for Smyth County. “People realizing that these are public makes everybody more open and honest and take steps to avoid conflicts of interest.”

But of eight town, county and school board clerks in Southwest Virginia polled by the Bristol Herald Courier, not one recalled a member of the public ever requesting the forms. If they were to ask, they would have been required to fill out a written Freedom of Information Act Request, wait for approval, pay copy fees and then pick the documents up in person, generally between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m.

H. Morgan Griffith, majority leader for the Virginia House of Delegates, who revamped the 2006 forms to require more complete disclosure, said public access to the forms is something he plans to bring up at the next General Assembly meeting.

“Times change, things change. It’s probably time we take another look,” Griffith said. “I do think they should be easier to get to than everybody having to figure out how to file a FOIA request. This shouldn’t be something you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get to.”

Those hoops are why the Center for Public Integrity’s 2009 survey calls even the best disclosure laws without easy public access an “empty gesture.”

The 700 forms in Tennessee and Virginia examined by the Herald Courier suggest there’s something to that. In Tennessee, where the documents are available to anyone online, 16 percent of the 420 statements reviewed have errors or omissions. In Virginia, where the documents are stored only in a dusty file cabinet, that error and omission rate jumps to 74 percent.

In June 1992, Gov. L. Douglas Wilder established a commission to determine changes to state laws that would encourage accountability in public officials. The commission reviewed more than 1,600 pages of written testimony that resulted in a report detailing 37 recommendations. Among them: “adopting a computerized financial disclosure system where all public information would be available to any person with access to a modem.”

Needless to say, no such computerized system exists, even today.

Still, in 1992, Virginia was largely ahead of the pack.

In 1999, the first survey by the Center for Public Integrity ranked the commonwealth 8th in the country for accessible information on decision-makers’ employment, investments, real estate holdings and so on. By 2006, Virginia had fallen 20 spots to 28th place. This year, it topped the bottom 20, in 31st place.

Appearances aside, the state hasn’t necessarily digressed. But while many other states rededicated themselves to transparency, Virginia remained fundamentally unchanged regardless of advancements in technology.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Carpinelli said. “If something’s not easily accessible, it’s not seen as being relevant.”

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531