July 19, 2010, 8:00 am

Gitmo Detainee Classifications Remain Detached from Identities

By Gabriel Debenedetti

When the Guantanamo Review Task Force summary report was released in June — more than five months after its completion — it marked the latest step in President Barack Obama’s plan to close the detainee prison in Guantanamo Bay.

Without identifying them by name, the report split the 240 detainees in four groups: approved for transfer; subject of active cases or investigations; too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution; and Yemenis designated for “conditional” detention.

Andrea Prasow, senior counsel for the terrorism program at Human Rights Watch, says the report is not transparent enough because it fails to specify which detainees belong to which categories. “People have a right to know how it came to that determination, why it came to that determination, and what its plans were for the future,” Prasow said, referring to the task force’s classifications.

Prasow also expressed concern that while 36 of the detainees fall into the “subject of active cases or investigations” category, 24 do not know what kind of trial or charges await them. The report notes that “no final determination has yet been made as to whether or in what forum these 24 detainees will be charged.” There is little reason for this information to be kept secret, she said, noting that even the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed about the detainee identities.

Read more

July 12, 2010, 12:33 pm

Project Updates on Recovery.gov Lack Clarity

By Claritza Jiménez

A Texas company that received $14,675 in economic stimulus money submitted a mandatory progress report to the federal government using just two words: “door mats.” A California solar energy company went to the other extreme, using technical language that gave little insight of what it did with a half-million dollars in taxpayer money.

“The purpose of the reports is to allow the citizens to know where the [stimulus] money is going and what is being used for,” said Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at George Mason University who is monitoring the process on his website, www.stimuluswatch.org. Some of the progress reports use such dense or bureaucratic language “you don’t have any idea what they’re saying,” he added.

Recipients of contracts, grants and loans funded with $275 billion of the massive economic stimulus law to create jobs are required to provide a report every three months explaining what the money is being used on and what it has achieved. The reports are posted on www.recovery.gov, which the Obama administration launched in February 2009 for taxpayers to keep tabs on how funds are spent.

But according to a 424-page review by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, most of the reports turned over to the government fail to clearly and completely describe the purpose of the award, how the money is being used, the status of work, and outcomes. The GAO found only 25 percent of stimulus recipients it sampled met this standard. Nearly 70 percent had some or most of the information, but not all. And 7 percent provided little or none of the required information.

“This is definitely something we’ve been seeing in the recipient reports — the narrative fields are not very informative,” said Sam Rosen-Amy, an analyst at OMB Watch, a watchdog group. “They can range anywhere from a few words that don’t mean anything to long, jargon-filled paragraphs that aren’t very helpful.”

Brito’s user-friendly website takes data from the government’s Recovery.gov site and lets readers rate stimulus projects from best to worst, share information on a project through a Wiki page, and debate on the quality of the projects in a comment section.

Read more

July 09, 2010, 3:30 pm

XBRL Requirement Disappears From Financial Reform Bill

By Ariel Wittenberg

A 34-line amendment to promote data transparency has turned into a financial reform bill whodunnit.

Members of the House Financial Services Committee are asking what happened to the concise amendment they tucked inside the massive bill to require the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, National Credit Union Administration, and Federal Housing Finance Agency to standardize the format used for collecting financial data.

Meant to increase transparency of financial information, the amendment was approved late last month by House negotiators, only to disappear from Senate negotiators’ version of the financial reform bill. The measure would have required the federal agencies to use eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) when compiling financial data for the newly-created Financial Stability Oversight Council.

The XBRL format is already required by the Securities and Exchange Commission for all public company reporting, and by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for bank data submissions. XBRL tags allow users to quickly find and download financial information into spreadsheets for analysis using off-the-shelf software.

“We really don’t have any idea what happened to the amendment,” said Frederick Hill, a spokesman for the amendment’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California. “That’s what’s kind of ironic about this — an amendment to foster transparency was pulled out in the least transparent way possible.”

The Senate Banking Committee had no immediate comment.

The final version of the financial reform bill has been passed by the House, and is expected to narrowly win approval from the Senate next week, sending it to the president to sign into law.

The XBRL language had bipartisan support from House members, adding to the mystery. Issa and Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois in March launched a bipartisan Congressional Transparency Caucus that aims to make government information freely accessible, consistently organized and electronically searchable.

“Without this [amendment] in the legislation you have different arms of the government doing different things with no communication and no coordination. That can cause a great many problems,” Hill said.

Both Issa and Democrat Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, have stated publicly that they plan to get the XBRL measure adopted by sending it to the House floor for a vote.

“The underlying reason Bernie Madoff wasn’t caught for so long is that there was no transparency,” Hill said, referring to the investment manager now serving a life sentence for bilking clients out of as much as $65 billion. “The disinfectant sunlight of transparency must prevail.”

ABOUT THE DATA:

What: XBRL tags on business information collected by U.S. government
Where: Fed, Treasury, CFTC, NCUA, FHFA
Availability: Already used at SEC, FDIC
Format: n/a

Read more

June 30, 2010, 3:29 pm

U.S. Energy, Mining Companies Must Disclose Government Payments

By Julie Vorman

U.S. energy companies will soon have to reveal how much they pay foreign governments for rights to produce crude oil, natural gas and minerals around the world.

Tucked near the end of the more than 2,000-page final version of the financial reform bill is language requiring energy companies to submit the payment information annually to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The provision was added by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a long-time supporter of the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and by Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, also a Democrat. That global initiative is backed by the World Bank, United Nations, and other groups, and aims to combat government corruption in resource-rich countries by monitoring and verifying payments received from energy and mining companies.

The new U.S. requirement is good for investors, said Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “When oil, gas and mining companies do business overseas – whether in Angola, Kazakhstan, Burma, Venezuela, or any other country – they pay those governments for concessions, royalties and other fees,” he said in a statement. “The American people and investors need this transparency to know if they are investing in companies that are operating in dangerous or unstable parts of the world.”

Human rights advocates hope the U.S. action will influence other countries. “This is going to be a tipping point because once the United States requires this, it’s only a matter of time until other countries require corporate disclosure of this kind,” said Isabel Munilla of Publish What You Pay, a coalition of human rights and environmental groups. The Hong Kong stock exchange recently adopted a similar requirement for companies traded on it, and there is a move underway by some British lawmakers to impose the requirement on the London stock exchange, she said.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents some 400 energy companies, opposes the new mandate.

Requiring only U.S. energy companies to report payments to host governments will hurt their ability to compete with quasi-governmental and national oil companies such as Russia’s Gazprom and China National Petroleum Co, API chief executive Jack Gerard said in a May letter to lawmakers. “Disclosing payments at this level of detail, including payments on a project level, means that foreign competitors would have access to very specific, propriety information that can be used against U.S.-listed companies in contract negotiations and for other purposes,” the letter said. That could mean lost jobs, he said.

The API criticized what it called the bill’s “unilateral approach” by the U.S. government. Instead, the industry group said it prefers to see countries adopt the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative because it requires all companies operating in a specific country to report their payments and protects proprietary information, according to the letter. “We don’t believe that a U.S.-only approach is the best way,” API spokeswoman Cathy Landry said.

In addition to detailing annual payments to foreign governments, U.S. energy and mining companies must also disclose how much they paid to various U.S. government agencies for production rights, according to the bill.

The financial reform bill, which focuses mostly on U.S. banking regulation and consumer financial protection, gives the SEC nine months to issue rules spelling out exactly how firms will report their energy and mining payment information. Companies must categorize the payments and include the currency used, the business unit that made the payments, the government that received the payments, and identify the project, the bill says. Reported payments must include taxes, royalties, license fees, production entitlements, bonuses, and other benefits that are part of the revenue stream from commercial development of oil, natural gas or minerals.

The SEC can demand any other information it finds “necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors,” the bill said. It set a nine-month deadline for the SEC to issue the regulations after the bill is signed into law. The House and Senate are expected to soon vote to approve the final language of the wide-ranging financial reform measure, sending it to the president for his signature.

ABOUT THE DATA:

What: Annual summary of U.S. energy, mining company payments to governments
Where: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Availability: When SEC completes rulemaking, possibly in 2011
Format: Electronic data
Usability: TBD

Send your tips on government data sets that you think should be made more accessible or user-friendly to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). You can also message us on Twitter or discuss the project on our Facebook page. We’re eager to hear what you turn up — full credit and links will be provided to individuals whose suggestions we use in our series.

The Data Mine is a joint project of the Center for Public Integrity and the Sunlight Foundation.

June 29, 2010, 12:20 pm

Free Repository Offers Copies Of PACER Federal Court Records

By Traver Riggins

Want to see the federal indictment of a mortgage fraudster? You got it. Need the docket for a U.S. appeals court case? It’s yours. All with the click of a mouse — and your 16-digit credit card number.

For a price, federal court filings have been available via the Internet through Public Access to Electronic Court Records (PACER) system since the early 1990s. But its fee of 8 cents per page is too steep for public documents, critics say.

Steve Schultze, associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, says public access to federal courts is essential to U.S. democracy. “On the other hand, providing public access requires expenditure of funds. Charging for access works against public access,” he said.

To make federal court documents available for free, Schultze co-founded RECAP, a Firefox plug-in that PACER users can use to automatically donate the court documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository. RECAP will also alert users when a document they are searching for within PACER is already available in the repository.

“It’s true that the cost of running PACER has grown only slowly over time, but the profits have grown dramatically,” Schultze said last week at a Center for American Progress meeting to discuss Law.gov, a series of workshops discussing the potential for a registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States. Law.Gov would be similar to Data.Gov, providing bulk data and feeds to commercial, non-commercial, and governmental organizations wishing to build web sites, operate legal information services, or otherwise use the raw materials of our democracy.

PACER collected about $90 million in revenue in 2009, accompanied by what the federal judiciary calls a “carryforward” — revenue left after costs were paid — of $40 million, according to Schultze. His analysis found PACER fees have funded projects unrelated to electronic document access such as upgrading federal courtrooms with flat-screen monitors and enhanced audio systems.

“Fee revenue in some years has exceeded expenditures, but that money does not comprise a ‘surplus,’” said Richard Carelli, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the Courts, the office responsible for the PACER system. “Rather, that money has been something of a war chest for future projects.”

Those future projects include updating the case file/electronic case management system through which each district federal court files all of its records and creating a “next generation PACER” which aims to be more searchable and user-friendly, according to Carelli.

PACER also competes with Westlaw and LexisNexis, which offer more sophisticated searching and display capabilities and charge higher fees for access.

The PACER system has already undergone some recent improvements. In addition to an enhanced search mechanism, this year it also began offering online digital recordings of court proceedings for $2.40 per file, compared to the previous fee of $26 for a CD copy from a court clerk’s office.

“We anticipate that the percentage of PACER users who do not pay a penny will climb to 75 percent in FY2010,” Carelli said. In March, the Judicial Conference decided to amend the fee schedule so that fees are waived for users who accrue less than $10 in costs per quarter. Previously, annual charges of $10 or less were waived.

“We believe we are good stewards of the fee revenue,” Carelli said, “and we are subject to Congressional oversight and annual audits. It costs a lot of money to maintain, modernize, and constantly secure the PACER system.”

ABOUT THE DATA

What: Federal court case filings
Where: Public Access to Electronic Court Records at http://www.pacer.gov
Availability: Online
Format: n/a
Usability: Searches can be cumbersome; each page of a court document costs 8 cents to view

Send your tips on government data sets that you think should be made more accessible or user-friendly to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). You can also message us on Twitter or discuss the project on our Facebook page. We’re eager to hear what you turn up — full credit and links will be provided to individuals whose suggestions we use in our series.

The Data Mine is a joint project of the Center for Public Integrity and the Sunlight Foundation.

June 25, 2010, 3:06 pm

One Year Later, Data.Gov Site Bigger But Needs to Get Better

By Gabriel Debenedetti

One year ago, the U.S. government launched Data.gov, a central plank in its Open Government initiative to make it easier for the public to find and use official datasets. The site has grown from an initial 47 databases to more than 272,000, and attracted nearly 100 million hits. It inspired eight American cities – including San Francisco and New York City – eight states, and six other nations to launch similar sites of their own. By most metrics, the project has been a success.

But government transparency advocates say the site has plenty of room for improvement. Gabriela Schneider of the Sunlight Foundation said that while the site is a good concept, it needs to be stocked with more useful datasets. “Over 270,000 of the 272,000 datasets on Data.gov are very specific geodata — essentially shapefiles that can be used to draw maps. [These are] not new and not really useful for researchers, developers and journalists,” she said. “There’s about 1,500 datasets that we actually care about and find valuable. A year into its existence, Data.gov should be cataloging much more than that.”

Data quantity is not her only concern, Schneider said. The site would be greatly improved if it added more data explanation and interpretation. “We’d love for the government to focus on improving the quality of the data, and also the metadata quality,” she said. “I have no idea how this data is being curated, how often is it being reviewed, how often is it being updated.”

Schneider said the one-year anniversary of Data.gov was accompanied by too much of a focus on the “shiny” parts of the site — such as its design — rather than a reinvigorated push for more information.

Federal government officials in the General Services Administration, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Department of Interior, and Chief Information Officer’s office, among others, did not respond to requests for comment from the Center.

When the Obama administration’s chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, wrote a post for the Open Government blog celebrating the one-year anniversary of Data.gov, he encouraged citizens to use Twitter to suggest more data for the site to publish.

Bryan Rahija of the Project on Government Oversight shares Schneider’s worry about data quality. “A concern that we have about the whole set-up is [that] agencies are [either] releasing information of convenience or information of substance, and so far it has leaned to information of convenience.” For example, he suggested that the Interior Department could have released data about oil drilling permit holders in the Gulf of Mexico, but has yet to release any data sets relevant to the oil spill.

Rahija also said he had problems with the formatting of some data sets, and when he asked for help, he met with a slow response. “Back in February I wrote the Energy Department asking, ‘do you think you can put [a database] up in XLS format?’” he said. “And I received an e-mail three or four weeks ago saying, ‘Hey, we’re working on that. No news yet.’ We’re four months into that request. I think it could go faster.”

Overall, both said the Data.gov project is certainly a step in the right direction.

“I would hate to criticize, because the fact is they’re making this information more available,” Schneider said. “But the next step is to make it more useful.”

Added Rahija: “I think it’s important that the government lay some sort of a framework for this information to be out there, so it’s not all bad news.”

ABOUT THE DATA:

What: Thousands of U.S. agency records and data
Where: http://www.Data.gov
Availability: Many different databases available for download
Format: Various
Usability: n/a

June 16, 2010, 2:52 pm

Education Department Pulls Student Debt Collectors Guide off Website

By Ariel Wittenberg

Students who defaulted on a college loan have one less tool to help them negotiate with collections agencies now that the U.S. Education Department pulled a manual for debt collectors off its website.

The department removed the Private Collection Agencies Procedures Manual from its website last month after a U.S. News and World Report blog, College Cash 101, detailed some useful tips from the manual for borrowers who have fallen behind in repaying their federal student loans.

Reporter Kim Clark’s blog said that although the 292-page manual from September 2009 is intended as a guide for collections agencies, it also reveals ways for debtors to get relief. For example, if the borrower makes a good faith agreement to repay the loan, the collector can waive all collection fees and reduce borrowers’ total debt by up to 10 percent.

While writing her blog post, Clark said she called the Education Department to see if there were any updates on the manual, and officials there “freaked out.”

“They told me that if people find out that they can negotiate a debt reduction of 10 percent they will hold out for it, and all sorts of things like that,” she said, adding that the Department of Education tried to convince her not to publish information from the manual. After publishing her story, Clark said the “next thing I knew, the manual was off the site.”

In response to the Center’s questions about the manual, the Education Department wrote in an e-mail that the electronic copy of the document was removed because the host website is currently under review. “Once it’s complete, we will re-post all appropriate information,” the e-mail said.

Although the Education Department’s e-mail recommended that student borrowers with defaulted loans consult the Federal Student Aid’s Collections Guide to Defaulted Student Loans, Clark said that guide is simply not as informative as the manual for collectors.

For example, in order to stop harassing telephone calls from collectors at work or at home, student loan borrowers must request in writing that collectors “cease all collection activity.” The precise language is important, the manual says, because simply asking a collections agency to stop calling does not carry legal weight.

Such semantics are in the manual, but not in the guide that remains on the department’s website. “How are you supposed to know that without this manual?” Clark said. “Lawyers used to go to it all the time to make sure the collectors were doing what they are supposed to.”

Luckily for student loan borrowers, the manual can still be found at the Student Learning Analytics Blog run by Tim Ranzetta. A copy of the manual is also now posted on the Center’s website.

The manual itself notes that 17 private collections agencies (PCA) annually recover billions of dollars in defaulted student loans on behalf of the Education Department. The department “strives to develop the best possible working relationship with the PCAs, while maintaining comprehensive oversight and a dedicated commitment to outstanding customer service,” the introduction to the manual said.

“I understand that the government has a natural tendency toward secrecy but in this case they should be setting the standards for transparency and protecting the people,” Clark said. “They might be delinquent [on their student loans], but they’re still tax payers.”

ABOUT THE DATA

What: Private Collection Agencies Procedures Manual
Where: U.S. Education Department
Availability: No longer on department’s website
Format: Word document
Usability: n/a

June 15, 2010, 1:21 pm

Farm Credit Regulator Won’t Disclose Enforcement Actions Against Its Banks

By Joe Eaton

As Congress negotiates a final version of financial reform, one group of lenders has already won a blanket carve out from increased bank regulation — the more than 90 banks and associations of the Farm Credit System, a government-sponsored enterprise that dates back to 1916. The system, which has $30.8 billion in capital, includes about 90 agricultural credit associations that are cooperatively owned, plus five wholesale lending banks.

Rural farm lenders didn’t cause the subprime crisis, and their business practices are above board, says Ken Auer, president of the Farm Credit Council, an association that represents Farm Credit System interests. Auer is correct about the subprime crisis, but you’ll have to take his word for the system’s stellar business practices. When farm credit banks stray, the federal Farm Credit Administration, which regulates the system’s banks, knows how to keep a secret.

In May, the Center for Public Integrity filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking the Farm Credit Administration to release its database of formal enforcement actions against system banks, which would detail any violations of laws or unsafe banking practices acted on by the agency. The administration replied that 100 pages applied to the Center’s request, but refused to release the documents.

Unlike the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. — two other U.S. regulators which routinely release their enforcement actions against banks — the Farm Credit Administration is not required by statue to disclose enforcement actions, said Jane Virga, acting FOIA officer “We are not under that mandate based on the Farm Credit Act,” she said. In addition, Virga cited a FOIA exemption that she said “protects the security of financial institutions by withholding from the public reports that contain frank evaluations of an institution’s stability …”

Read more

June 11, 2010, 4:00 pm

Quest for EPA Documents Reveals Deliberate Misclassification By Agency Staff

By Naseem Miller

For the past four years, as executive director of Citizen Action New Mexico, Dave McCoy has been hounding the local and federal government for documents.

McCoy alleges that Sandia National Laboratory’s Mixed Waste Landfill monitoring wells are mismanaged by the New Mexico Environment Department, and that the public water supply is in danger of contamination.

He requested documents from an EPA regional office that assessed the state’s oversight of the landfill and after getting little information, complained to the EPA’s inspector general. The watchdog concluded in an April report that some officials deliberately failed to document management problems with the monitoring wells and wrongly classified some documents, as confidential to withhold information from McCoy’s advocacy group.

“The Region 6 Project Engineer for Sandia stated that her section discontinued record keeping in favor of undocumented phone calls and conversations with NMED to prevent the production of documents,” the inspector general’s report said, referring to the New Mexico Environmental Department. “During an interview with the OIG, the Project Engineer for Sandia informed us that her section had discontinued record keeping of phone calls and discussions between the Region and NMED because of CANM’s (Citizen Action New Mexico) requests for documentation regarding the MWL, including extensive requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act.”

The EPA’s Region 6 office denies any wrongdoing.

In a response included with the inspector general’s report, the regional officials said “marking documents ‘confidential’ is a common practice ‘throughout the agency’ for many (unclassified) documents.” The officials also wrote: “… these charges are simply not true. Documents were not misclassified and details of EPA’s evaluation were not withheld from the public.”

The inspector general’s report — which cost almost $273,000 to produce — recommended that the EPA regional administrator “evaluate the extent to which the Region has not recorded oversight information, or misclassified information, to determine the scope of administrative action or training necessary to remedy the situation.” EPA’s recommendations are unresolved, according to the report.

The report also scolded the EPA regional office, saying agency policy requires staff to make decision-making processes open and accessible to interested groups. “This policy also instructs EPA to approach all decision making with a bias in favor of significant and meaningful public involvement. The Region’s actions do not do that,” the inspector general wrote.

But McCoy isn’t thrilled about the inspector general’s report. “They limited the scope of the investigation to the point that it didn’t address what we wanted to be addressed,” he said in a recent interview. He said he is not stopping his quest to obtain government documents about the monitoring wells. He just won a FOIA appeal and obtained other EPA documents that may have useful data. “We’ve got 13,000 pages of documents hidden for 10 years about every lab and military site across the state of New Mexico,” he said.

UPDATE — 6/14/10: In an email response to the Center, a spokesman for EPA Region 6 said the office “respectfully but fundamentally disagrees” with the Inspector General’s report. “The Region has followed established information release procedures under the Freedom of Information Act which were upheld by the Office of General Counsel and long-standing oversight protocols in partnership with State regulators” said EPA Senior Legal Counsel Bruce Jones.

ABOUT THE DATA

What: 2007 EPA Region 6 assessment of monitoring wells management
Where: EPA Region 6
Availability: In dispute
Format: Paper document
Usability: n/a

Send your tips on government data sets that you think should be made more accessible or user-friendly to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). You can also message us on Twitter or discuss the project on our Facebook page. We’re eager to hear what you turn up — full credit and links will be provided to individuals whose suggestions we use in our series.

The Data Mine is a joint project of the Center for Public Integrity and the Sunlight Foundation.

June 10, 2010, 3:42 pm

White House Visitor Log Too Big For Some Spreadsheets

By Gabriel Debenedetti

The White House pledged to “increase governmental transparency” by publishing its visitor access records but the downloadable database may be too large for many users’ personal computers to handle.

The database, which contains entries beginning in September 2009, reveals that the White House regularly receives more than 100 visitors per day. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey visited the White House three times in 2009, for example, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is listed seven times, most recently on Dec. 15 for a holiday reception.

When the Center for Public Integrity downloaded the data from the White House website, the larger-than-100 MB file could not be opened in Microsoft Excel 2003 because the file contained too much data. Opening it in Microsoft Word resulted in a document that was 32,585 pages long with unsortable data. That means if a user wanted to search for White House visitors on a given day, for example, he or she faces the daunting task of having to repeatedly search for that date within the Word document, which often, but not uniformly, arranges entries alphabetically by last name.

However, computers equipped with the newer 2007 version of Office can access the data in Excel.

Read more