Report Claims Flaw Found in Illinois Tranparency Portal

The Illinois Policy Institute released a report today that claims information is being removed from a website designed to shed light on how the state spends money. 

In 2008, state Rep. , R- sponsored a bill that created the Illinois Transparency and Accountability portal, a website containing all state contracts, agency and department expenditures, and employee salaries. Lawmakers approved the bill in 2009, and the portal soon went live on the web.

"Illinois' transparency portal was meant to be among the most comprehensive in the nation," said Tryon.

According to the Institute's newest report, Now you see it, now you don't, the state has been removing information about how much state workers were paid in past years. Meanwhile, past departmental spending remains online.

The Illinois Policy Institute is a nonpartisan research and education organization.

"It's important to have both the current and historical information easily and readily available to taxpayers so they can see how their hard-earned dollars are being spent, and assess whether they think lawmakers are using those dollars wisely," said Mark Cavers, a government reform policy analyst at the Institute, and one of the authors of the report. "With all the debate this year over public employee compensation, this is an easy way to move the discussion toward facts and away from rhetoric."

Tryon, the original sponsor of the Illinois Transparency and Accountability portal, said removing historical information was not the bill's intent — and he plans to do something about it if administrators don't quickly put the information back on the web.

"Salary information from past years was never meant to be taken down. I know, because I wrote the bill," Tryon said. "One of transparency's most important benefits comes from viewing historical data so you can see changes over time. To see where you're going, you need to know where you've been. I'm sponsoring legislation that would clearly instruct portal administrators to put past information online and keep it there moving forward."

The report points out that readers used to be able to find salary histories dating back to 2008, but now only allows readers to go back as far as 2010.

The law authorizing the Illinois Transparency and Accountability Portal requires the state to maintain all current state employee salary and agency expenditure information. The law is silent on whether previously posted information must be kept on the website, the report states.

According to the report, the solution to the problem is to have state leaders opt for more transparency.

"Once up, salary information should stay up. The law authorizing the Illinois Transparency and Accountability Portal (Public Act 096-0225) should be amended to require that information presented on the website remain publicly available. Better yet, the state could add historical data going back five or ten years," the report states.