JUNEAU -- A public advocacy group has given Alaska an F grade in openness and transparency of government information, but state officials say some of the criticism is not merited.
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group and its Alaska affiliate released its latest "Following the Money" report this week, ranking state efforts to show citizens how their money is being spent.
Alaska's Checkbook Online website was state of the art when the transparency website was first introduced by Gov. Sarah Palin, but these days it doesn't measure up, the group said.
While other states have been boosting public access to information about what government is doing, Alaska is falling behind, said Jessie Peterson of the Alaska Public Interest Research Group.
"With a looming budget crisis that will deeply impact Alaska, the overall message AKPIRG wants our government leaders to hear is that it is the responsible and ethical choice to provide the Alaskan public with as much information on state spending as possible," Peterson said.
But Scot Arehart, director of the state Division of Finance, said the report was "not always fair."
For example, Alaska's website lost points for not having a built-in search function, but the viewable and downloadable spending spreadsheets and PDFs on Checkbook Online can be searched by standard searches within the programs, he said.
But some of the criticisms were valid, he acknowledged.
Arehart said some of Alaska's problems are due to a 1984-era financial management system that is now in the process of being upgraded. It is so old that it has been hard to hire programmers to work on it, he said.
"With the platform we are going to, there are opportunities to improve our transparency," Arehart said.
Gov. Bill Walker has made openness and transparency a public focus of his administration, and Arehart said the new system will give the state the capability of making more information public, which is important to the state.
"I can do better transparency, and I understand and agree with the governor's directive," he said.
Another area in which Alaska lost points was in its numerous state-owned agencies and enterprises that operate independently and which don't have their spending information centrally located. The quasi-public agencies are not included in state spending reports.
"Alaska also does not include any quasi-public agencies in its online checkbook, excluding all of the money that such agencies use from any public scrutiny," Peterson said.
The worst ranking in the nation went to California, where USPIRG said "bureaucratic fragmentation" meant that citizens did not have a "one-stop" transparency portal, and that information can be difficult to find for those who don't know where to look.
Best in the nation was Ohio, which got the only perfect transparency score, followed by Indiana, Wisconsin, Oregon, Louisiana and Connecticut.
Alaska was also downgraded for failure to provide to the public information about what are sometimes called "tax expenditures," and what Alaska legislators call "indirect expenditures."
Those are things such as tax credits and other provisions in state law that reduce state revenue collections for some public purpose but don't show up as budget items.
Among the programs cited in the "Following the Money" report for failing to provide information on recipients are the state's film tax credits, oil and gas tax credits and the commercial fishing revolving loan program.
Alaska actually went backward on transparency in one of those programs when it moved administration of its film tax credit program from the Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development to the Department of Revenue and stopped releasing to the public the identities of recipients. Budget issues have led to the program's suspension and possible elimination.
Rep. Steve Thompson, R-Fairbanks, has been pushing aggressively to get more scrutiny of indirect expenditures since a Legislative Research report identified more than half a billion dollars in such expenditures over the last five years, not counting oil and gas credits.
But in Alaska, expenditures linked to taxes are not released to the public.
Thompson said that starting to provide information about how much each of those programs is costing will help public officials make better decisions about which should be kept and which might be eliminated.
Arehart said that when the new finance system, called an Enterprise Resource Planning system, is up and running, it will enable the Division of Finance to make much more information available online. The first part is scheduled to go online in July, he said.
As Alaska has been working on the new ERP system, it has been watching its USPIRG transparency ratings decline as other states have leapfrogged Alaska.
"We've done nothing different -- it is their criteria that they're using to delineate transparency that's changing," Arehart said.
But Arehart said he appreciates the attention the issue is getting from the group.
"They're trying to raise the expected level of transparency, which is a good thing," he said.