Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Wisconsin to U.S. PIRG Education Fund: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You





Some Wisconsin "mentions" in the report.
  • Wisconsin unresponsive.  U.S. PIRG Education Fund researchers sent a list of questions and an initial assessment of each state’s transparency website to the officials responsible for their state’s site and received responses from such officials in 47 states (all states except Idaho, Vermont and Wisconsin).
  • Wisconsin unresponsive again.  In some cases, our research team adjusted scores based on this clarifying feedback. Only Idaho, Wisconsin and Vermont did not respond to our inquiries.
  • Wisconsin -- which dropped 11 points -- did not make the transparency site, Contract Sunshine, searchable by Transparency 2.0 standards. Whereas last year, Wisconsin received full credit for searchability because contracts could be sorted by the first letter of the vendor name and type of item/service purchased, this year Wisconsin received only partial credit. Wisconsin also failed to make the transparency website mandated by the 2011 budget checkbook.  
  • Recently, the Department of Administration launched a website that provides expenditure and revenue information for programs within departments. This website was not graded because it is not checkbook-level— visitors are unable to view the individual payments made to vendors—and would have earned a score lower than Contract Sunshine .



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