EDITORIAL: State government isn’t living up to transparency promises

When the Legislature moved to update and expand the state’s online checkbook in 2022, the measure that did so passed with bipartisan approval — unanimous, in fact — and broad public support. That makes sense; Alaskans like (and deserve) to know what the state is doing with public funds, and the checkbook is an incredibly important tool for providing that oversight. But more than a year after the bill passed, and months after the deadline in law for the update to take place, Alaska’s online checkbook has little functionality that it didn’t already have when the Legislature voted in 2022 — and none of the required additional data on expenditures by state corporations such as the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and the Alaska Energy Authority, as well as the Alaska Permanent Fund’s earnings reserve.

The state’s online checkbook was initially developed during Gov. Sarah Palin’s tenure in office, amid a wave of anti-corruption sentiment following the infamous “Corrupt Bastards Club” scandal that saw legislators taking bribes from an oilfield services company. As the old adage goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant — but in this case, the curtains have remained stubbornly drawn. In the decade and a half since, the checkbook — which tracks expenditures larger than $1,000 by state agencies — has alternated between functional-but-clunky and offline altogether.

In response to the creaky and sometimes malfunctioning state of the checkbook, Sen. Bill Wielechowski authored and the Legislature unanimously passed a bill requiring updates and expanded functionality for the transparency tool, allocating $250,000 to fund the upgrade, as well as a further $67,000 for updated server architecture. The bill also gave a generous timeline for the Department of Administration to comply with the expanded disclosure requirements, allowing a year after the bill’s passage into law for the transition. Department of Administration officials, during that time, expressed confidence that they would meet the deadline for the new reporting requirements — until it came and went in October. Now, although the checkbook is online, it’s missing several required components: In a letter to the department, Wielechowski pointed out that “this application does not work reliably on mobile devices and is lacking the information on state income, fund balances, and royalty deposits required by the act. It also appears that the website does not provide expenditure data for state corporations as required by the act.”

And as Alaskans know well, state corporations — in particular AIDEA — are prime candidates for mandated transparency, due to a checkered history of committing state money to boondoggles with little in the way of public input or oversight. AIDEA has an incredibly important mission, as does AEA, and allowing Alaskans to see where the corporations’ money is being spent is essential to building and maintaining public trust in these institutions.

We’ve seen this kind of foot-dragging on accountability measures before from government agencies — the Anchorage Police Department is only now beginning to implement body-worn cameras after years of delays. It’s impossible to ignore the government’s tendency to be lackadaisical about implementing systems that increase the public’s ability to see what’s going on behind the scenes, even when those initiatives are so popular they were supported by groups as disparate as the Alaska Public Interest Research Group and Americans for Prosperity.

Almost universally, candidates on the campaign trail promise to be more transparent than their predecessors, only to pull back on those guarantees once the race is won. Transparency has to be more than campaign lip service. We should expect this administration to walk the walk. It’s up to Alaskans to remind them — and to demand an explanation for where the money spent to expand the state’s online checkbook has gone, as well as when we can expect to see the financial information that is now overdue, and which is required by law to be made public.