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Watchdog Group Calls for More Fiscal Transparency from Washington State

The Washington’s Public Interest Research Group Foundation downgraded the state’s transparency rating, citing accessibility concerns.

(TNS) — OLYMPIA, Wash. — A new report finds Washington state “middling” when it comes to fiscal transparency on its government-disclosure website.

The report, released Thursday by Washington’s Public Interest Research Group Foundation, gave the state a “C” for information disclosed on the site Fiscal.wa.gov.

The grade is a backslide from the “B-plus” Washington earned in 2016 on a similar report.

States have made strides in the past decade to post more information online, so researchers have changed the criteria.

Those changes reflect not just the need for budget and fiscal information to be posted online, but also “the ease with which it should be accessed,” according to the report.

For this year’s study, researchers put more weight on determining whether an average person could find certain budget information within five minutes.

For example, researchers looked for how much money the state Department of Agriculture might have spent on motor fuel, or how much the Attorney General’s Office might have spent on contracted legal services.

In that part of the study, Washington state fared poorly.

“Clearly Washington has a lot of work to do to make our website more friendly,” said Elise Orlick, executive director of WashPIRG, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization.

Overall, Washington landed as one of 17 states in the “middling” category.

Such middle-of-the-pack states had basic search functions for looking up fiscal data, “but lack other usability tools and provide limited information on subsidies or other ‘off budget’ expenditures,” according to the report.

In 2016’s report, five states earned “A-plus” grades. But with the new criteria for this year’s study, only Ohio and West Virginia earned such high marks.

This year, four states received a failing grade: Alaska, California, Hawaii and Wyoming.

©2018 The Seattle Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.