LANCASTER, Pennsylvania — Finding the first bit of evidence that Gene Cooper’s job damaged his brain and destroyed his health was the easy part. That only took his wife four years, eight doctors and at least a dozen tests.

The hard part: Getting his former employer to pay.

Eight years have passed since Sandra Cooper filed a workers’ compensation claim on her husband’s behalf. She prevailed after 4 ½ years of wrangling, when a judge agreed that chemical exposure on the job at a flooring factory was the reason Gene Cooper — a bright father of two with a quirky sense of humor — had transformed into a nursing-home patient who couldn’t speak and sometimes stared into space when his family visited. That was 2012. Sandra Cooper is still trying to get medical bills and lost wages covered today, nearly two years after he died.

The trouble Cooper has had isn’t unusual for this type of case. What’s unusual is that she’s gotten anything out of workers’ compensation at all.

Americans hurt at work have a difficult enough time with the state-by-state system when their injury is so obvious and immediate — such as an amputation — that it can’t be blamed on anything but the job. When it comes to chemically induced illnesses and other job-triggered diseases that creep up over time, according to researchers and the federal agency overseeing occupational safety, workers’ comp rarely works at all.

“It’s not good, and in many ways, it’s gotten worse,” said John F. Burton Jr., a workers’ compensation expert who chaired a national commission on the subject during the Nixon administration.

The difficulty is partly inherent in the diseases themselves. Most that can be triggered by job exposures — from cancers to lung ailments — have other possible causes, too. Genetics. Smoking. Simple bad luck. Workers have to first suspect their job was to blame and then build a case, gathering exposure information, finding medical experts willing to dig for answers. Most people with occupational diseases never file a claim, researchers say.

But state-run workers’ compensation programs have built additional barriers, often at the urging of industry groups.

In most states, proving that there was a workplace exposure, that it is a known trigger of the illness in question and that, in fact, it was as likely as not the cause of the claimant’s problem isn’t sufficient. Claimants must show work was more likely to blame than all possible outside causes their employers suggest. In some states, the burden of proof is even higher.

And at least 11 states, including Pennsylvania, Alabama and Virginia, require most or all sick workers to file claims within several years of their last hazardous exposure, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis — even though symptoms for a variety of occupational illnesses can take far longer to appear.

The denial rate for disease claims in Ohio and Oregon, rare states that track the outcome of such cases, is three times higher than for injury claims.

The insurance industry points to claimant fraud as a reason for tighter rules, contending that employees and their doctors too often shift costs into workers’ compensation that aren’t due to work. States, employers and insurers “have to be very careful … in terms of guarding access to the system,” said Robert P. Hartwig, president of the industry-supported Insurance Information Institute.

But J. Paul Leigh, a professor of health economics at the University of California, Davis, found major costing-shifting in the other direction. A study he co-wrote in 2004, partially funded with a federal grant and cited in a 2015 report by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about how the system fails workers, estimated that more than 95 percent of ultimately-fatal occupational diseases are never covered by workers’ comp.

“It was remarkable — unfortunate, actually — the huge disparity between what workers’ compensation paid for and what epidemiological estimates consider are the true deaths attributed to occupational exposure,” Leigh said.

Taxpayers picked up nearly $27 billion in expenses from work injuries and illnesses in 2007 alone through federal programs such as Medicare, Leigh and a co-author estimated in a separate 2012 study. The biggest share of the burden fell on the workers and their families: an estimated $125 billion, or half the cost.

‘What’s the matter with Dad?’

Gene Cooper was 48 the day he struggled home from the flooring plant where he worked in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, coughing and coughing. He told his wife he’d had to help clean up a spill.

That was September 2003. The cough was so persistent that Sandra Cooper made him see a doctor, but soon she had other things to worry about. Her husband — a talented investor who was more than halfway done with a master’s in financial planning — was suddenly having trouble with simple tasks.

“By late October into November, he was mixing up gender, losing proper nouns when he spoke,” Sandra Cooper said. “The kids noticed and kept asking, ‘What’s the matter with Dad? What’s going on?’ Really, by Christmas, he was very confused, going to work the wrong time, getting dates mixed up.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter,” he told her right after Christmas of that year, teary eyed.

Seven months after the spill, he could no longer work. By 2006, he was in a nursing home, not speaking, his family unable to tell whether he recognized them or not. As his body deteriorated and Parkinson’s symptoms set in, he lost the ability to swallow, and that was how he died in 2014 — choking on the aspirated contents of his stomach. It’s an image his wife cannot get out of her head.

The bills to care for him were so massive — hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth — that they gobbled up his retirement fund, his investments and his Social Security disability payments. Sandra Cooper had to tap their son’s college fund, the inheritance her late mother left her and lines of credit to keep going.

Her initial efforts to find out if work could be the cause of his illness went nowhere. The occupational medicine specialist who saw him in 2005 couldn’t help because Sandra Cooper had no idea what substances were in the spill. Her lawyer did request her husband’s medical and exposure records that year from his employer, Lancaster-based Armstrong World Industries, and came away empty-handed. Armstrong spokeswoman Jennifer Johnson said in an email that the company needed a request in writing and did not get one. Sandra Cooper said the company refused to turn over records at all unless she filed a workers’ compensation claim.

Later, OSHA would cite Armstrong for failing to share exposure information when requested in 2015 — a citation the company called minor and said has been resolved. Lawsuits would be filed, alleging that the company intentionally tossed workers’ records into a Dumpster, a claim the company denies. The coroner, after Gene Cooper’s autopsy, would rule that complications from chemical exposure at work caused his death.

But that was all in the future. At the time, Sandra Cooper had nothing to go on to file a claim. Specialists were still struggling to accurately diagnose her husband’s condition, let alone what triggered it. All that was clear was he had some form of dementia.

Then, a doctor filling out paperwork in late 2007 checked a box indicating that Gene Cooper’s medical problems were caused by work. Sandra Cooper took her first step into the world of workers’ compensation, thinking she would finally get some help.

The system is supposed to be faster, cheaper and less adversarial than a lawsuit. That’s frequently not how it plays out in state systems across the country, especially for illnesses. Nor was that the case for the Coopers.

Armstrong filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2000 after a wave of asbestos lawsuits — it once installed asbestos insulation — but has been out of the bankruptcy courts for nine years now. The publicly traded company, which reported nearly $240 million in operating income last year, contested the Coopers’ claim with all the vim of a civil-suit defense.

The company first contended the request for workers’ compensation came after the statute of limitations had expired. When that didn’t quash the claim, Armstrong put more than a dozen witnesses on the stand to make the case that Gene Cooper had not helped clean up the spill, would rarely have come into contact with chemicals at work and was suffering not from solvent-triggered brain damage but simply a non-occupational instance of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, according to the workers’ compensation judge’s summary of the case.

Sandra Cooper had to bring her own medical experts in to testify, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in further costs. The four specialists — two neurologists, a neuropsychologist and a toxicologist — all linked her husband’s dementia and Parkinson’s symptoms to solvent exposure, in part by using brain scans to identify the type of damage. Other witnesses spoke about conditions at the plant, including an Armstrong worker who testified that he saw Gene Cooper coming up from the basement where the spill clean-up was in progress.

The judge, detailing all this in a 96-page decision letter, declared the claim compensable. Gene Cooper had indeed been exposed to hazardous chemicals as a result of the spill — which occurred while the area was left unattended so workers could go to a safety fair — and over the course of a three-decade career with Armstrong, mostly as an inspector, wrote Judge Tina Maria Rago. Those chemicals included a carcinogenic and neurotoxic solvent called trichloroethylene. Armstrong “admitted the existence of these chemicals” in the plant after the Coopers’ witnesses testified to it, Rago wrote.

But that 2012 decision was far from the end of it. Though largely upheld by the Pennsylvania workers’ compensation appeal board, the original decision was narrowed by the board’s 2014 finding that the company would not have to pay compensation to Sandra Cooper for the 3 ½ years between her husband’s last day of work and the date she was finally able to file the claim. Until notice was provided, “no compensation was due,” the board ruled.

Meanwhile, a forensic accountant she hired to sift through her records testified in July that $364,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses for Gene Cooper — from before and after the contested 3 ½-year period — remained unreimbursed. Large amounts of interest and post-claim lost wages also have not been paid, the accountant testified. Sandra Cooper said it was only in August, years after the decision, that she received any reimbursement for medical costs incurred after the claim was filed.

Armstrong’s Johnson wrote in an email that the company, while unable to speak in detail about a pending case, has “fully complied with the workers’ compensation decision addressing Mr. Cooper’s medical bills.” She did not address the issue of wages but said some of the medical expenses are “under review or in dispute.”

“We recognize and respect that an employee who is hurt or harmed in the workplace is entitled to pursue a worker’s compensation claim. However, if the claim is erroneous or unfounded, the employer has the right, and arguably the duty, to contest the claim, which is exactly what we are doing,” Johnson wrote. “For example, with respect to Mr. Cooper we do not believe the medical conditions outlined in his case were caused by chemical exposure in the Armstrong workplace. That matter … is currently under appeal by both parties.”

Safety, including proper handling of chemicals, “informs everything we do and is our number one priority,” Johnson added.

Word of Sandra Cooper’s battle with Armstrong slowly spread. One by one, people approached her — other sick former workers from that flooring plant. Some of them had Parkinson’s, like her husband. Others had cancer, particularly multiple myeloma, a rare bone-marrow condition some studies link to solvent exposure. Sometimes it wasn’t the workers themselves but their survivors who came to her.

None had filed a workers’ compensation claim for those illnesses. A few had only suspected a work connection; for most, the possibility had never crossed their minds. Now it was too late to file a claim: Pennsylvania’s deadline, set in 1972, is a few months shy of six years after the last on-the-job toxic exposure.

Appellate court opinions suggested the purpose of the cutoff was to “prevent stale claims” and “prevent speculation over whether a disease is work-related years after the exposure occurred,” according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry.

The former Armstrong workers and their families came to Cooper with the same question: What should they do?

‘Grand bargain’

Workers’ compensation developed a century ago in the country, state by state, as an attempt to fix a broken system. Injured employees rarely prevailed in court, because laws at the time immunized companies from liability if the worker contributed to his injury in any way — even by slipping. Employers, meanwhile, had to defend themselves frequently enough — occasionally with big-ticket losses — that they were anxious about costs.

Workers’ compensation was pitched as a “grand bargain”: Injured employees would get medical and wage assistance without having to prove negligence, while employers would not have to pay for pain, suffering or punitive damages.

This new system wasn’t merely an alternative to lawsuits. It was — and remains — a substitute. With rare exceptions, typically in cases involving a clear intent to harm, the only option for people seeking compensation from their employers for on-the-job injuries or illnesses is workers’ comp.

When workers’ compensation systems were first set up in the U.S., the major known risk an employee faced was traumatic injury. Mine explosions. Train derailments. Machinery malfunctions. Hazards were ever-present: Some 23,000 people died in U.S. industrial accidents in 1913.

Now, though, deaths from occupational diseases outnumber fatal work injuries nine to one, according to a 2011 analysis by Leigh, of the University of California, Davis. But workers’ compensation still handles injuries better than illnesses, said Burton, the workers’ comp expert and a professor emeritus at both Rutgers and Cornell University.

The denial rate is markedly higher for disease claims than for injury claims in the few states that track that statistic. In Oregon, for example, 36 percent of disabling-disease claims were denied in 2014, compared with 11 percent of disabling injury claims. In Ohio, disease claims were denied nearly half the time in 2014, compared with just 14 percent of injury claims.

When workers’ comp does pay for an occupational disease, it’s far more likely to be a condition such as tendinitis or carpal tunnel syndrome than potentially deadly illnesses such as cancer, Leigh found in 2004.

Rules written decades ago and never changed are part of the problem. At least 11 states, for instance, set the worker’s deadline to file a claim for most or all diseases based on the time elapsed since the last exposure to the hazard — not when the person was actually diagnosed with the illness. In those states, the window generally closes in one to seven years.

Silicosis, a lung disease triggered by the silica dust that can shroud a badly run construction site, typically takes 10 years or more to develop. Bladder cancer, which can be set in motion by coal tar, metalworking fluids and other workplace toxics, usually appears 15 to 40 years later. Mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos, almost always lies latent for decades. Other such examples abound.

The National Commission on State Workmen’s Compensation Laws said in 1972 — 43 years ago — that deadlines should be set after employees become aware that they have an occupational disease, given the “substantial lag” that can come between exposure and diagnosis. At that point, about half the states didn’t meet that test.

Iowa is one of the states that still don’t. If workers there do not become disabled or die within one year of the last “injurious” exposure, or three years if the hazard causes one of the lung diseases categorized as pneumoconiosis, they’re out of luck. The only exception is for diseases involving radiation, in which case workers are allowed to actually find out that they have a disabling occupational illness before the clock starts ticking.

Paul J. McAndrew Jr., an Iowa lawyer who has represented employees in workers’ compensation cases for 25 years, called the state’s deadline rule “a patent injustice” that requires him to tell very sick people that they have no legal remedy against their former employer. Usually, the people he is able to help file a claim are those still employed at the site that made them ill.

He was part of a brief effort just over a decade ago, when Iowa made changes to workers’ comp, to get the deadline altered. Workers’ advocates proposed to start the clock ticking when the disease is discovered. That idea was immediately batted down, McAndrew said. 

“When we negotiated in 2004, the only message coming back from defense side that made any sense at all was, ‘This one is too valuable. We won’t even consider it,’ ” he said. “It’s a well-known cost savings to the insurance industry. That’s what it is.”

Other barriers are part of a more modern effort by states to lower workers’ compensation costs for employers.

“Over the past 25 years, states have made it much harder for both illnesses and injuries to receive workers’ comp benefits,” said Les Boden, an economist and a professor of environmental health at Boston University.

Mississippi and Louisiana, for instance, both rewrote their laws in 2012 in an effort to overturn court precedent that rules be interpreted in favor of workers when resolving disputes. Many states have raised the level of proof a worker must meet from essentially 50-50 to a higher standard, usually a preponderance of the evidence, according to Emily A. Spieler, a law professor at Northeastern University who once headed the West Virginia workers’ compensation system.

With the waning of union power, there’s been little organized effort to push back, Spieler said.

Preponderance of the evidence is a typical civil-suit standard. Charles Davoli, a Louisiana lawyer who is past president of the Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group, argues that the original intent of workers’ compensation was to make it easier than suing — since employees gave up their right to the higher payouts civil cases can bring. Changing that, he said, “is all about cost mitigation.”

Lawyers who represent companies or insurers see a 50-50 standard as too low for a properly functioning system.

“Because these things are very easy to allege and very difficult to investigate and disprove, I think at least from my perspective, it’s not unfair to have a heighted burden of proof,” said Bill Scherle, a workers’ compensation lawyer in Iowa who largely focuses on defense work.

Some states apply a still-higher standard of clear and convincing evidence, either for all occupational diseases or if the claimant’s condition can be classified as an “ordinary disease of life” — conditions the general public could contract, even though certain jobs can increase the risk of developing them.

Virginia has that type of rule. And with the exception of hearing loss and carpal tunnel syndrome, the state doesn’t define whether a condition is occupational or ordinary, leaving the parties to argue it out in front of the program’s judges, according to the Virginia Workers’ Compensation Commission.

Douglas Landau, a workers’ compensation lawyer in Virginia, had to prove a client who baked rolls at a middle school — and developed a non-disabling lung ailment after daily exposure to flour dust — had no outside exposure of even a minor nature. He put a witness on the stand to testify that his client did not, in fact, bake the cakes she brought to monthly Elks Lodge meetings.

Landau takes workers’ compensation cases in other states as well but said a lot of clients, once they learn about the difficulties, opt to seek disability help from Social Security instead. The burden of proof makes it “extraordinary difficult” to win an occupational disease claim in workers’ compensation, he said, “even if you’ve only had one employer your entire career and even if the offending toxin or particle can be identified.”

Trey Gillespie, senior workers’ compensation director at the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, a trade group, agrees that workers face difficulties with proof. He sees lack of medical evidence as the major problem, not the system itself. If you develop cancer and ask your doctor what caused it “quite often, the doctor will say, ‘I don’t know — it could be lots of things,’ ” he said.

“I think the workers’ comp system is prepared to take care of workers that have an illness that scientific research supports … is occupational in nature, but until the scientific research hits that level, then basically the burden really falls upon other private-payer systems or the public-payer system to help employees that have that illness,” Gillespie said.

Some of the people shut out of workers’ compensation by deadlines, rather than medical evidence, have turned to the courts for help — with varying results.

Iowa’s highest court ruled in 1991 that employees cannot collect workers’ compensation for diseases discovered after that state’s deadline, and then ruled in 1998 that such workers also could not sue their employers.

But Pennsylvania’s highest court, considering two cases brought by mesothelioma victims, went the other way in 2013.

“It is inconceivable that the legislature, in enacting a statute specifically designed to benefit employees, intended to leave a certain class of employees who have suffered the most serious of work-related injuries without any redress under the Act or at common law,” the majority of the justices wrote.

In Pennsylvania, if the disease manifests after the workers’ compensation deadline of 300 weeks from the last exposure, an ill worker has no remedy in that system. Therefore, the justices ruled, he or she can sue.

Since July, about a dozen former Armstrong workers — or their survivors — have done just that.

The plaintiffs

Don Roberts worked at the Lancaster plant for 27 years, until downsizing hit in 1997, and was employed at a medical-supplies firm when he began to have balance and memory problems. It was Parkinson’s, a diagnosis that came as a shock seven years ago.

Now 64, Roberts had to take his Armstrong pension early — slicing his payments in half — so he and his wife wouldn’t lose their house. Covering his health insurance cost them about $700 a month for the 3 ½ years before he qualified for Medicare. And in August, to improve his symptoms, he underwent brain surgery that required him to remain conscious while two holes were drilled into his skull.

“It’s just a Band-Aid,” said his wife, Marilyn Roberts. “There’s not a cure for this, not at this point.”

The Robertses are among those suing Armstrong, all of whom are represented by Sandra Cooper’s lawyer, George Chada, a toxicologist-turned-attorney. The lawsuits contend that Armstrong triggered diseases by regularly exposing workers to a product called Safety Solvent. A 1989 Armstrong purchase document and a 2008 fax — turned up as part of Cooper’s fight against the company — both give the product’s components: largely methylene chloride and trichloroethylene with some methyl ethyl ketone thrown in for good measure.

Trichloroethylene is a known human carcinogen; methylene chloride is considered a likely cancer-causing agent. Trichloroethylene in particular is associated with a variety of ailments — Parkinson’s, liver and other cancers, neurological problems and kidney damage among them. It’s one of the chemicals implicated in illnesses and deaths among people who worked and lived at the contaminated Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base in North Carolina.

The former Armstrong employees worked in their street clothes, which they wore home to be laundered, and they now worry about the implications for their families. The Robertses’ son, Jason, was born with only one kidney and is a co-plaintiff in their lawsuit.

Johnson, the Armstrong spokeswoman, wrote in her email that the company has not seen any evidence supporting “that any of the medical conditions identified in the plaintiffs’ complaints are as a result of their employment at Armstrong.” The company does not use the solvent described in the pending lawsuits, she wrote, “and if we ever used the particular type of solvent to which you refer, it would have been many years ago.”

“In all of our plants, we follow and often exceed all applicable safety requirements, including those relating to protocols for working with chemicals and the use of proper protective equipment,” Johnson wrote.

The lawsuits also contend that Armstrong purposely destroyed medical and exposure records. One exhibit includes an affidavit from an employee who attests to witnessing this last year and a string of photos showing boxes and file folders tossed in a Dumpster. (Cooper filed a lawsuit against Armstrong, too; it focuses on such concealment-of-information allegations.)

OSHA, looking into the dumping allegation because companies are required to share such records with employees when asked, couldn’t conclusively prove what was thrown away. Johnson said the binders and boxes were empty. But OSHA cited Armstrong in September for failing to give medical and exposure records to a former employee’s representative when requested.

Johnson said the OSHA citation involved “a few non-substantive administrative items” and has been resolved. She said the company has turned over tens of thousands of pages of medical and exposure records to the plaintiffs’ lawyer.

Several of the lawsuits involve cases of multiple myeloma, linked in some studies to trichloroethylene and methylene chloride. Judy Wendler’s husband, George, who worked at the Lancaster plant for 30 years, died of the condition last year at 65 after a nearly six-year struggle.

Wendler, a registered nurse, had to keep working while caring for him in order to stay insured — she’s still not sure how she managed. Despite the insurance, and Medicare eventually kicking in, she amassed thousands of dollars in credit-card debt to cover his healthcare expenses.

“It just really took a toll on the whole family,” Wendler said. “His bones became brittle from the multiple myeloma; they more or less were eaten away, is what we were told. … But he made himself do things, in great pain.”

Sherry Riley is another plaintiff. Her husband, Jeffrey, who worked at the Armstrong plant from 1986 to 2000, was just 47 when he died five years ago from leukemia. His loss was a devastating emotional and financial hit she is still trying to recover from. She had to borrow money recently to keep her house out of tax sale.

“I’m getting my electric shut off, I’m on food stamps, I’m selling things … I’m trying everything I can,” Riley, 54, said this summer.

Then there’s Michael Moeller, who worked at the Lancaster plant for more than two decades before transferring to other Armstrong facilities. His 2010 death at age 50 was so mysterious that it took the coroner’s office almost 3 ½ years to determine the cause: acute severe hemolysis triggered by trichloroethylene exposure. The chemical set off an autoimmune reaction in which his body attacked his own red blood cells.

“He essentially suffocated to death,” said Stephanie Bernstein, his sister.

At his parents’ house in Lancaster, a photo collage his family made for his funeral shows him as a baby, a child, an adult, always with the same sunny smile.

“It was the worst shock when that coroner called,” his mother, Marie Moeller, 77, said in October.

A few months earlier, just up the street, former workers and spouses filled up the seats in Sandra Cooper’s living room. They talked about conditions in the 106-year-old plant, particularly in the ’80s and ’90s. The stench of chemicals, they said, was ever-present.

Marilyn Roberts turned to her husband and asked, “Don, did you ever have any protection at all?”

“We had gloves on,” he said, pressing one of his hands to the other to try to control the tremors. “That’s all we basically had.”

What’s the fix?

In 1972, President Richard Nixon’s National Commission on State Workmen’s Compensation Laws declared that the states’ programs were, “in general, inadequate and inequitable.” Burton, who chaired that commission, said the states did better for a while — trying to stave off the possibility of federal intervention — but have backslid since.

He doesn’t hold out much hope of reforms to help ill workers in the current environment.

“Politics in many states are pretty conservative,” he said. “I think the problem you’ve got right now is the problem the national commission wrestled with, which is, left to their own devices the states are in a race to the bottom.”

The Insurance Information Institute defends the current workers’ compensation setup. The rules in place, the group says, are necessary.

“Unfortunately, there’s a long history of fraudulent behavior and efforts to shift costs into the workers’ compensation system,” said Hartwig, the group’s president. “In order to keep workers’ comp costs manageable for everyone, it’s important that the system have a very prescribed manner in which eligibility is determined and compensation is made.”

The institute pointed to statistics from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, a nonprofit that helps fight insurance fraud. Insurers referred about 3,500 questionable claims involving workers’ compensation to the NICB in 2011 and about 4,500 in 2012, according to the group’s most recently released figures.

But both figures amounted to about 0.1 percent of total workers’ compensation claims and include potential fraud by companies — such as undercounting employees to reduce premiums — as well as workers or doctors.

Texas Mutual Insurance Co., which has 40 percent of the workers’ compensation market in that state and aggressively investigates fraud, found $5.3 million in employer fraud last year, six times the amount of claimant fraud it discovered.

Some health advocates see a nationally run system — or at least active oversight from the federal government — as part of the solution to workers’ compensation woes. Indeed, after taking responsibility for administering benefits to coal miners for black lung, the federal government did once contemplate handling other occupational disease claims.

In 1980, the Department of Labor issued an interim report suggesting such a move as one of several options to improve a situation in which, the agency noted, people with job-related illnesses rarely received help from workers’ compensation. Social Security and welfare programs were left to pick up costs amounting to $2.2 billion annually, the agency said.

Glenn Shor was one of the analysts working on that report in the agency’s Office of Health and Disability. Nothing ever came of it, he said. After Ronald Reagan was elected, Shor said, the study group was disbanded.

But the interim report outlined ways to make the challenge represented by occupational disease somewhat less daunting, whether in a state or federal system, including better data collection and presumption standards to reduce the difficulty workers have proving the cause of their disease. The report also discussed how to ensure that companies rather than taxpayers footed the bill — for instance, by levying a tax on disease-prone industries.

That’s important not only to make sure ill workers get treatment, said Shor, a member of the occupational health and safety section of the American Public Health Association. It’s about incentivizing companies to reduce health hazards so the illnesses don’t happen in the first place.

“If you don’t have to pay for it,” Shor said, “you’re not going to do much to prevent it.”

A workers’ comp case drags on

Sandra Cooper sat quietly as her lawyer’s voice filled a small Lancaster hearing room in July. George Chada did not hide his frustration.

Robert J. Goduto, the workers’ compensation judge who took over the case after the 2012 decision finding it compensable, had not allowed one of Cooper’s financial experts to testify. When Chada asked that Armstrong be made to disclose more information about its payments related to the claim, the judge’s response was to calmly ask him to sit down. And now, Armstrong’s lawyer was arguing that the appeals board decision from the previous November — the one that said the company would not have to pay “compensation” for the 3 ½ years before the claim was filed — should extend not only to lost wages but also to medical expenses.

Goduto expressed interest in the case law on that point, but he did not entertain Chada’s request to present evidence that the company did not turn over information that could have helped Cooper file the claim years earlier.

Chada jumped up again, outraged. “So you’re going to allow the employer to conceal its notice, and then get a credit for concealing its notice? That would reward a fraud!”

“Please have a seat,” Goduto said.

Two months later, three workers’ compensation judges — Goduto among them — gave a seminar for the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce & Industry. The talk was billed as an opportunity to hear the judges “discuss pointers on how employers can be successful in workers’ compensation litigation.”

Cooper couldn’t believe it when she saw an announcement for the event. Armstrong is a member of the chamber. She filed a pending motion citing this and asking for the case to be reassigned back to the original judge.

Goduto, who represented companies in workers’ compensation matters before becoming a judge, declined to comment. Sara Goulet, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Labor & Industry, said by email that she could not speak about specific complaints but added that judges’ discussion at such seminars focuses on the process, “not how to win a case.”

Cooper can appeal the issue of the unpaid 3 ½ years to Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court. But she has to exhaust all her appeals within workers’ comp first. She thinks her case shows how, even when a claim is approved, the system benefits employers and insurers because delays primarily harm cash-strapped claimants.

“The longer they drag it out, the longer it takes to get paid,” she wrote in an email, “and the more legal costs I incur.”

It has eaten up her life, this conflict, and forever altered it. She was a high school art teacher, and now she navigates the complex world of chemical exposures and disease causation, helping others just starting down the same road.

Sitting in her living room this summer, she recalled how her husband — back when they were in their 30s or early 40s — would turn to the obituary section of the local newspaper and exclaim that some guy or other he’d worked with had died. Usually the man had just retired, she said.

Only later did the possible connection to work hit her. She’s sobered by the thought that this is a national problem, not just a Lancaster one.

“People, they don’t connect the dots. I mean, people do get cancer. If you don’t know anything about toxicology, and who does, how would you possibly know that [work could be the cause]? You just don’t,” Cooper said. Workers in that situation can’t hold companies to account, she added, “and that’s what they bet on — that people don’t know.”

Federal law lets political action committees wait weeks, even months, to reveal which candidates benefit from their cash.

But Twitter's nascent PAC, which is poised to make its first-ever federal campaign contributions, plans to disclose such donations within 48 hours — tweet-like speed, relatively speaking, company officials tell the Center for Public Integrity.

"Timely disclosure is something we could do. We figured, 'Why not?'" said Colin Crowell, Twitter's head of global public policy.

Crowell added that Twitter, Inc. #PAC intends to donate to federal candidates this election cycle. While not yet naming names, he said the PAC would aim to support candidates who, for example, support patent law changes, government surveillance reforms and strong digital privacy policies.

Is Twitter attempting to make a statement or get other PACs to follow its example?

"We just think it's the right thing to do for Twitter," Crowell said.

Twitter's PAC has raised about $95,000 — and spent less than $800 — since its creation in August 2013 and the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission records. The money came from employee contributions. Its next campaign finance filing is not required to be submitted until January.

In an update to its corporate political policies, Twitter will also publicly disclose its trade association memberships and membership costs, as well as any financial associations it has with nonprofit "social welfare" organizations, which aren't required to reveal their donors.

Some social welfare groups have spent significant amounts of money advocating for and against political candidates since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which enabled such direct political spending.

Will Twitter’s voluntary actions start a disclosure trend? “Probably not,” said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which supports limited campaign finance regulations.

“It’s a free country. People can say what they want,” Keating added.

Twitter's new policies come at a time when the company is expanding its presence in Washington, D.C., where most members of Congress and practically every government agency has a Twitter account.

It's also a period of tumult for the nine-year-old, San Francisco-based firm. Twitter has watched its stock price plunge, and last month, it installed its co-founder Jack Dorsey as its new chief executive officer.

Twitter first began lobbying the federal government in 2013, spending $90,000 on lobbying efforts that year.

In 2014, its lobbying spending soared to $310,000, and through the first nine months of 2015, the company has already spent $330,000, according to congressional records. More than half of its total this year came during the third quarter alone, as the company pressed lawmakers and the White House on issues including commercial data security, email privacy and National Security Agency surveillance.

Crowell said Twitter increasingly cares about such issues because they "go to the heart of what makes Twitter special."

Today, Twitter employs two in-house federal lobbyists and has contracted with three outside lobbying firms this year, according to records maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics. Both Twitter's lobbying team and overall expenditures, while growing, remain significantly smaller than those of other prominent tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

Twitter is also teaming with CBS to co-host a Democratic presidential candidate debate on Nov. 14 at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

Twitter has previously hosted a variety of other political and government-related events, including a Twitter Town Hall at the White House in 2011.

Earlier this year, Twitter angered some political transparency advocates by effectively killing Politwoops, a three-year-old project by the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation that archived politicians' deleted tweets.

In a statement at the time, Twitter explained that third-party organizations preserving deleted tweets were violating the company's developer agreement.

"Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress," Twitter wrote.

The Pentagon was tipped off in 2011 by a longtime Army contractor that Russian computer programmers were helping to write computer software for sensitive U.S. military communications systems, setting in motion a four-year federal investigation that ended this week with a multimillion-dollar fine against two firms involved in the work.

The contractor, John C. Kingsley, said in court documents filed in the case that he discovered the Russians’ role after he was appointed to run one of the firms in 2010. He said the software they wrote had made it possible for the Pentagon’s communications systems to be infected with viruses.

Greed drove the contractor to employ the Russian programmers, he said in his March 2011 complaint, which was sealed until late last week. He said they worked for one-third the rate that American programmers with the requisite security clearances could command. His accusations were denied by the firms that did the programming work.

“On at least one occasion, numerous viruses were loaded onto the DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] network as a result of code written by the Russian programmers and installed on servers in the DISA secure system,” Kingsley said in his complaint, filed under the federal False Claims Act in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on March 18, 2011.

Asked to confirm that the Russians’ involvement in the software work led to the presence of viruses in the U.S. military’s communications systems, Alana Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Defense Information Systems Agency, declined to answer on the grounds that doing so could compromise the agency’s “national security posture.”

“It’s something that we take very seriously,” Johnson said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “The Department of Defense’s posture on cybersecurity ultimately affects national security.”

Kingsley first told a Defense Information Systems Agency official on Jan. 10, 2011, that Russians had been doing computer programming for Massachusetts-based NetCracker Technology Corporation under a federal contract, through  an arrangement that corporate officials referred to as its “Back Office,” he said in his complaint. He said the work had been done in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia.

The DISA official confirmed that the practice of outsourcing the work to employees in Russia violated both the company’s contract and federal regulations that mandate only U.S. citizens with approved security clearances work on classified systems, Kingsley’s complaint said.

On Monday, NetCracker and the much larger Virginia-based Computer Sciences Corporation — which had subcontracted the work — agreed to pay a combined $12.75 million in civil penalties to close a four-year-long Justice Department investigation into the security breach. They each denied Kingsley’s accusations in settlement documents filed with the court.

The agency’s inspector general, Col. Bill Eger, who had investigated Kingsley’s allegations, said the case was a good example of how his office combats fraud. In  a separate statement released Monday, Channing D. Phillips, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, said that “in addition to holding these two companies accountable for their contracting obligations, this settlement shows that the U.S. Attorney’s Office will take appropriate measures necessary to ensure the integrity of government communications systems.”

The $22 million contract the companies were working on dates from 2008, when the Pentagon first asked Computer Sciences Corporation to fortify and administer the computer networks of the Defense Information Systems Agency. The agency supports battlefield operations by running communication systems that enable soldiers, officers, and coalition partners to communicate in secret.

Computer Sciences Corporation collected a total of $1.5 billion from the Pentagon in fiscal year 2014, according to the Federal Procurement Data System. The work at the heart of this case was part of a $613 million contract between the Defense Information Systems Agency and the corporation. Netcracker, whose top executive has been on the cover of Forbes magazine and which has done direct work for the Air Force and the General Services Administration, worked as a subcontractor on the deal.

In his complaint, Kingsley asserted that Computer Sciences Corporation executives knew about Netcracker’s work in Russia.  But a corporation spokeswoman, in a written statement, denied it. “[Computer Sciences Corporation] believes it is as much a victim of NetCracker’s conduct as is our [Defense Information Systems Agency] customer and agreed to settle this case because the litigation costs outweigh those of the settlement,” Heather Williams wrote. “Security is of the utmost importance” to the corporation, she wrote.

Kingsley also said in his whistleblower complaint that when he questioned NetCracker’s general counsel about the propriety of the arrangement, the counsel assured him nothing was wrong. When he asked the company’s board of directors for permission to discuss the Russians’ participation with the Defense Information Systems Agency, his “requests were rebuffed,” he said in the complaint.

The next day, in an email to the board of directors at NetCracker Government Services, the company’s general counsel characterized Kingsley’s conversation with the government official as an “unscheduled, one-on-one meeting” that ended with a “vitriolic rampage” and left the Defense Information Systems Agency officer with the impression that Kingsley was a “lunatic,” according to Kingsley’s complaint. Kingsley said in his complaint that this description of the meeting was incorrect and intended to hurt Kingsley’s reputation with the company’s other board members.

Joanna Larivee, a spokeswoman for Netcracker, responded with a written statement that it “has cooperated fully with the Department of Justice throughout its review of this matter and explicitly denies liability for any wrongdoing. We have always taken responsible steps to ensure that best practices are deployed when managing client information and that NetCracker is compliant with the terms of our contracts. We have decided that it is in the best interest of all stakeholders to settle the matter.”

Of the total fines, NetCracker agreed to pay $11.4 million while the Computer Sciences Corporation agreed to pay $1.35 million. Under the False Claims Act, Kingsley’s share of the settlement is $2.3 million, according to the Justice Department.

Kingsley did not respond to a phone message left at his home in Fairfax, Virginia, on Tuesday. His lawyer, Paul Schleifman, said Kingsley spoke up about the Back Office in Russia because he was worried that it could harm national security. “[Kingsley] believes that his obligation is to the United States first,” Schleifman said, “not to his pocket.”

The settlement agreement leaves the door open for the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges based on Kingsley’s allegations. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not respond before deadline when asked whether any such charges are expected.

This story was co-published with the Daily Beast.

In New York, former State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver is on trial this week after being charged in January with accepting millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks.

His lawyer Steven Molo said in his defense, “It’s impossible, absolutely impossible, for a member of the Assembly to do his or her job and to go out, make laws, deal with people, do the job that a person in the Assembly does and not have some form of conflict of interest.”

Last week, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon wrote an op-ed piece, calling his state’s ethics laws “some of the weakest in the nation,” and laying out specific measures he would like to see legislators address when they return to the Capitol. Among them: banning gifts from lobbyists and enhancing transparency.

Both of these stories reflect notes struck regularly in state governments in the three years since our original State Integrity Investigation. The project was a data-driven assessment of all 50 state governments and their laws and practices meant to deter corruption and promote transparency and accountability. In 2012, New York earned an overall grade of a D and Missouri earned a C-.

A lot has happened since then. And a lot hasn’t. Which is why on Monday, in partnership with Global Integrity, we’re releasing the 2015 State Integrity Investigation, chock-full of more questions, scandals and D and F grades than the last time around.

We’ll issue not only overall grades, but also specific grades and scores in thirteen categories: public access to information, political financing, electoral oversight, executive, legislative and judicial accountability, the state budget process, civil service management, procurement, internal auditing, lobbying disclosure, ethics enforcement agencies and state pension fund management.

Want to know how your state ranked?

Sign up for our e-mail newsletter to stay up to date on the investigation, or stay in touch by following us on Twitter or liking us on Facebook.

South Carolina ethics laws require candidates to describe how they spent their campaign money. Here are some examples:

• In July 2012, Sen. Kent Williams, D-Marion, spent about $800 at Best Buy, pegging the purchases as “unknown.” In an interview, he said that he bought an iPad for everyday legislative purposes.
   
• Over four years, Rep. Bill Sandifer, R-Seneca, spent $2,300 on an American Express card, listing the expenditures only as “office.” He didn’t respond to requests to view these receipts.

Time and again, state legislators and candidates cloaked their campaign expenses in vague terms that gave the public no real idea of what the money bought, an investigation by The Post and Courier and the Center for Public Integrity found.

Lawmakers often used one- or two-word explanations, such as “supplies,”  “transportation,” “campaign expense,” “expense reimbursement,”  “fee” and “incidentals.”

One result of this lack of transparency is that the public must go to the legislators and candidates directly if they want more details.

Then it’s up to these candidates to decide whether to release this information.

When presented with opportunities to do so, some declined. Since 2009, Rep. Chip Huggins, R-Columbia, gave at least $73,000 in campaign money to his wife, Ginger, records show. His campaign disclosure forms described at least $39,000 of those expenditures with terms such as “reimburse see receipts” and “see receipts” or simply the letters “FR.” Huggins said his wife handles some of his campaign work. “If I can’t trust my wife, who can I trust?”

When asked if he would produce those receipts, Huggins declined, saying, “I’m not going there. You’re not on the Ethics Committee.”

Huggins said he tries to be as specific as possible about the expenditures. And some of his disclosure forms bear this out. He listed $150 spent on “8 cases of beer” from Budweiser on June 22 this year and $150 on “california rolls, crab rangoons, dragon rolls, fortune cookies” from Miyo’s restaurant in Columbia on June 25, 2013.

He said that he thinks ethics laws could be clarified, and that making receipts available online might be one option. “Then it would be clear cut. Then you’ve got it,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to distrust me.”

Rep. Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island, combined multiple expenditures into single entries such as “legislative travel,” “meetings and share of meals” without stating what was purchased or where any of those expenditures took place. The vendor for about $30,000 of these expenses was his American Express card.

Unlike some candidates, who declined to show The Post and Courier their receipts, Merrill supplied copies immediately. And those receipts showed where he stayed and ate. Like other candidates, Merrill said limited space on online forms prevents lawmakers from giving detailed information about expenditures.

Candidates have 200 characters to describe expenditures, said Herbert Hayden, executive director of the State Ethics Commission. That’s 60 more characters than a tweet. And some candidates left no doubt about what their campaigns purchased — and had plenty of spaces to spare. Rep. James Smith, D-Columbia, in 2012 bought a “new Toshiba L875D-S723” from Staples on Pine Log Road.

But a quick glance at candidates’ forms reveals that many often used just a word or two, or acronyms. State candidates, for instance, paid roughly $140,000 since 2009 to individuals, consultants and others for “GOTV” and similarly vague terms for “get out the vote.” Campaign disclosure reports list few other details about those expenditures.

Lawmakers don’t have to turn in their receipts and invoices; according to the state’s ethics law, they merely have to “maintain and preserve” them for four years.

That’s different than the requirements for state employees and most employees of businesses who must turn in receipts to accountants and auditors, said Christopher Birkel, an assistant professor of legal studies at the College of Charleston’s School of Business.

“As a state employee, we have to show them the hotel bill, the airline bill — we’re held to that standard, which is much like private businesses.”

Birkel said that in addition to his job at the college, he also does work for a private company and sends receipts via his mobile phone. Because of these technological advances, “it’s incredibly easy to document your spending,” he said.

How does the state make sure candidates properly and fully fill out their forms? It depends.

The South Carolina Ethics Commission is responsible for compiling reports from candidates for positions across the state, from mayors to the governor. The agency’s online reporting system requires these candidates to fill out various fields. If a field is left blank, it won’t allow the report to be filed.

But the agency has no auditors to do random checks to ensure that expenses are correctly and fully described, said Hayden, the commission’s executive director. The agency only investigates “when something is brought to our attention.”

Meantime, the commission doesn’t have jurisdiction over members of the House and Senate. And the level of scrutiny varies here: The Senate audits every campaign report, but the House has only begun to create a formal audit mechanism. In September, the House Ethics Committee approved a proposal to do random audits of 10 representatives a year.

Lawmakers have broad leeway to use their campaign funds but are not supposed to use them for personal expenses unrelated to the campaign or the office they hold.

Bogus descriptions have led to several public corruption cases. Four years ago, the state Ethics Commission discovered then-Lt. Gov. Ken Ard had used campaign funds to buy an $800 dress for his wife, filing it under “supplies” in his disclosure forms. When investigators checked other receipts, they discovered that he’d bought an iPod Touch, a flat-screen TV and a Playstation 3. Ard, a Republican, eventually pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and received five years probation.

Ex-Sen. Robert Ford also hid expenditures with deceptive descriptions, such as “purchase” for adult novelty items from Badd Kitty. The Democrat described a gym membership as “campaign worker-gratuity.” Ford resigned his Senate seat in 2013 and earlier this year was sentenced to five years of probation in his public corruption case.

Since those prominent cases have come to light, lawmakers have done nothing to make it easier for the public to keep track of campaign expenditures. Efforts to pass stronger ethics laws last year failed, with senators throwing up the biggest legislative roadblocks.

“Until you get a rigorous way of monitoring these disclosure forms and identifying suspicious transactions, nothing will change,” said John Crangle, director of Common Cause South Carolina.

Glenn Smith, Doug Pardue and David Slade of The Post and Courier and Rachel Baye and Ben Wieder of the Center for Public Integrity contributed to this report.

This story was co-published with The Post and Courier.

November 10, 2015: This story has been corrected.

One day before Oregon’s usual Valentine’s Day statehood celebration this year, the Capitol was awash with reporters chasing a rare story on the abuse of access to power rather than the frosted sheet cake being handed out by the Oregon Wheat Growers League to mark the state’s 156th birthday.

In a state where ethical behavior is assumed rather than regulated, former Gov. John Kitzhaber offered his resignation in a pre-recorded speech heard in his reception room, while de facto-governor Kate Brown prepared for duty in the secretary of state’s office a floor below.

Kitzhaber was being investigated following media reports that his fiancé, a consultant, was selling access to the governor’s office and using state resources for personal gain, and that he blurred the line between his job as governor and his re-election campaign.

For many in the state, Kitzhaber’s resignation is a thing of the past. But the scandal that ensnared the former governor highlighted a wobbly legal framework in Oregon’s government, where good behavior is taken for granted rather than enforced.

That framework explains why Oregon fared poorly in this year’s State Integrity Investigation, earning an overall score of 58 – an F grade – and tied for 44th among the 50 states in the data-driven assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity.

“It’s not like Chicago or something,” said Dan Lucas, a researcher, policy advocate and chief editor of the blog Oregon Catalyst. Noting four of the last seven Illinois governors went to jail, he said, “We don’t have that level of corruption.”

But Oregon’s relative lack of scandal may be a function more of good manners rather than of law. As Lucas and others note, and this year’s failing grade suggests, lines are easily blurred in Oregon government, and ethical lapses and partisan abuses of power – while often not criminal – have been smoothed over by both political maneuvering and etiquette.   

Kitzhaber’s resignation caused Oregon to receive an F in the category of executive accountability. The debacle also ensnared the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, and highlighted why Oregon is one of the worst performing states with regard to access to information (F).

Oregon’s overall failing grade represented a substantial dip from the C- the state received from the last State Integrity Investigation scorecard in 2012, but the grades and scores are not directly comparable due to changes made to improve and update the questions and methodology—like eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

Ethics Commission missteps

Oregon’s ethics commission didn’t move quickly to investigate complaints regarding Kitzhaber, and more importantly, his fiancé Cylvia Hayes. At the time, officials said they struggled with whether she was covered by state ethics law.

But the law is clear – Hayes, as a member of Kitzhaber’s household, was subject to the rules. Yet – until ethics reform passed the legislature afterwards – the ethics commission was unprotected from political interference by the governor’s office. The governor either appointed its directors, or gave names to the Democratic-controlled legislature for nomination by party leaders, one possible explanation why the commission didn’t act. Even after reforms, Oregon’s ethics commission still lacks budget protections and the staffing and technical support to see its mission through.

The commission’s lack of rigor hurt most every other category of this assessment.

As the keeper of records designed to collect robust information about the state’s elected officials and civil servants, the commission never audits the asset-disclosure forms it collects, the State Integrity Investigation revealed. Enforcement has been so lax that political leaders have been able to fudge on specifics in their disclosure forms or simply fail to provide significant information. The forms aren’t available online so that members of the public can check. And the State Integrity probe discovered that people who examine the forms universally report that the quality of information is substandard.

Holes in public records law

Such issues underscore why Oregon remains one of the worst performing states regarding access to information (an F grade), ranking tied for 34th even in a category where only six states earned a passing grade. The state has no open data laws or independent agency charged with overseeing citizen access to government. Oregon’s Public Records Law is also full of exemptions – at least 480 – and lacks firm deadlines for delivery of public records. The Kitzhaber debacle underscored the consequences when public information doesn’t flow freely or in a timely way; substantive deadlines might have allowed voters a closer look at Kitzhaber’s issues before he was re-elected, only to resign a month after his swearing-in.

Oregon’s lawmakers (D- in legislative accountability), like the ethics commission, operate without legal safeguards against unethical conduct. The state legislature still does not have laws prohibiting nepotism and cronyism in hiring, for example – a situation intended to allow rural legislators to support a family in the state capital of Salem but that leaves the government vulnerable to abuse. And low pay combines with a lack of campaign finance law to eliminate a buffer between Oregon legislators and special interests in the private sector. 

As a result, legislators can grow accustomed to practices that cut corners. They may fudge the lines between their part-time legislative duties and their other jobs, angle for work in places where they shouldn’t or find themselves enormously dependent on campaign contributors as state races get more expensive.

“The problem in our legislature regarding integrity is not about the ethics stuff. Or going to jail. These are intellectual integrity issues…” said Phil Keisling, Director of the Center for Public Service of the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University.

Few requirements for judges, courts

The judicial branch is also plagued by potential for conflict and a lack of legal safeguards; the category grade for judicial accountability is F. While, again, Oregon judges don’t seem to have overt corruption issues – judges weren’t sanctioned for bad behavior at any point during the study period – staffing shortages prevented many state-level judges from offering full opinions on their rulings. And Oregon lacks laws to force its judges to explain their decisions to the public. The state also lacks judicial performance evaluations, and is behind other states in making court data publicly available. Unless a complaint is filed, the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness lacks the power to investigate problems, and even then, those records are sealed unless they lead to discipline.

There were some bright spots: the state’s budgeting process earned a C and the secretary of state’s audits division a C+. Both were sufficiently staffed, transparent, and had the authority to act with independence, suffering only from the same lack of legal safeguards that brought state scores down overall.

And while Oregon’s civil service system scored only a 66 – a D grade ­– that ranked the state 12th, the highest of all its category rankings. Government workers aren’t always protected from political interference in Oregon, but the civil service system in the Beaver State does seem to be better than most.

Correction, November 10, 2015, 4:15 p.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that the ethics commission lacks the authority to independently investigate bad behavior.

New bronze plaques adorn four of the portraits in the halls of the state Capitol in Harrisburg, in a collection that honors Pennsylvania's legislative leaders from Benjamin Franklin's time to the present.

The images of three former House speakers and a former Senate president pro tempore now bear engraved plates memorializing the dates of both their tenures and their corruption convictions.

The dubious decorations, added by order of last-year’s legislative leaders, are the closest Keystone State lawmakers have come to calling out the most recent spate of wrongdoing among their own.

The lawmakers, three of whom were snared in bipartisan schemes to use taxpayer funds for political campaigns, were among 40 members or top aides of the Pennsylvania Legislature who have been found guilty or pleaded guilty to public corruption charges in the past four decades, by informal count of G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College. "Not one has ever been censured or reprimanded by an ethics committee of their chamber," said Madonna. "I want you to think about that. They don't have to worry about their own colleagues doing an independent investigation."

The lack of legislative or executive accountability and the absence of effective ethics entities, as well as weak laws and lackluster oversight of lobbying, political finance, and elections, have combined to give Pennsylvania an F in the 2015 State Integrity Investigation, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. Pennsylvania's numerical score of 58 placed it tied for 44th among the 50 states.

The failing grade marked a slide for Pennsylvania from the C- grade and 20th-place ranking the state earned in a similar assessment published in 2012. The new score is not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the questions and methodology. This year's assessment did not take into account the process for redistricting, for instance, which generally occurs only once every 10 years, and additional questions were added on open data standards and election oversight.

Business as usual?

Veteran Pennsylvania political observers were not surprised at the state's abysmal integrity rating. They describe a culture of casual acceptance for corruption that has become a self-sustaining force in the Keystone State: It has bred such broad voter cynicism that there is little effective public pressure for reform.

"I followed the custom when I should have followed the law," Pennsylvania's former Turnpike Commission chairman Mitchell Rubin told the court last November as he pleaded guilty to bribery.

The once-sprawling corruption case, centered on the state's toll road system, spoke volumes about the law and law enforcement in Harrisburg. Even though Rubin admitted accepting meals and collecting political contributions for legislative candidates from a contractor on the understanding it would influence his decision-making, his plea  allowed Rubin to avoid jail time on the charges. The case ended with none of the eight original Turnpike defendants going to prison, and most of the charges dropped,  including those against a former state senator. Some observers blamed the state attorney general's office for mishandling the case, while others believe Pennsylvania's laws made the matter difficult to prosecute from the start.

There is no statutory prohibition in Pennsylvania law for state officials accepting gifts or hospitality, unless there is an explicit quid pro quo. Defense attorneys have successfully fought off prosecution of bribery by arguing that gifts were never linked to specific contracts or favors.

Philadelphia's district attorney did step in last year to prosecute four state legislators from the city caught on videotape taking cash from a lobbyist acting as an undercover informant. Two of those lawmakers pleaded guilty this summer and resigned their seats, but were able to avoid more serious charges and jail time and keep their state pensions. Two of the accused remain in office, fighting the charges.

Attempts at reform

Earlier this year, Harrisburg made its first move to quell gift-giving scandals. As one of his initial acts in office, new Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signed an executive order banning gifts for political appointees under his jurisdiction. Two independent agencies recently tarnished by scandal — the Turnpike Commission and the state's ever-controversial Liquor Control Board — did the same. In part because of this move, Pennsylvania had an executive accountability rating near the middle of states in the State Integrity Investigation. But category ratings for legislative and judicial accountability were among the worst of all states.

It would require legislative action to make a gift ban permanent, or to have it apply to the state's lawmakers or its judges, who are elected. Although gift ban bills have been introduced and approved in the state House or Senate — as recently as last year— they've always fizzled before becoming final.

"A lot of lawmakers go to Harrisburg with the notion of changing the culture and lifestyle," said Madonna, of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs. "But they soon learn that you've got to go along to get along, if you want to get your bills through."

An even more serious problem than gift-giving, observers say, is Pennsylvania's lack of limits on campaign contributions, contributing to its ranking of eighth-worst state in political finance, according to the State Integrity Investigation. Individuals can kick in as much as they wish, as long as the donations are reported. And although corporations cannot donate directly, they can easily get around that restriction by creating their own political action committees, which are permitted by law to donate directly. "It's the wild west in terms of money in Pennsylvania politics," remarked Larry Otter, an election-law attorney from Bucks County, in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Last year, spending on the Pennsylvania governor's race reached a record $82.3 million. Wolf, a businessman, contributed $10 million of his own money to launch a successful campaign against incumbent Republican Tom Corbett. But labor unions and businesses, with issues hanging in the balance in Harrisburg, poured money into the race on both sides, including the state's controversial and relatively new natural gas fracking industry.

The months-long budget standoff between Wolf, a Democrat, and the Republican-led state House and Senate, now feels clouded by the record campaign spending. Wolf wants to raise money with a severance tax on the gas drillers; Pennsylvania is one of the few major energy-producing states with none. But state lawmakers, whose campaigns also have benefited from gas industry largesse, won't budge.

"The fracking industry is just the latest special interest that has learned to play the game," said Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, an advocacy group.

Searching for revenue 

Meanwhile, the Legislature says the state could sell its 600 state-run liquor stores to private owners and bring in $220 million in revenue in the first year, something Wolf refuses to do. The governor says that selling a valuable asset would be bad for Pennsylvania in the long run, citing the potential profits of the stores, which brought $80 million into the state’s general fund in 2014. But critics accuse Wolf of bending to the will of one of his major donors, the state store workers' powerful United Food and Commercial Workers union. It doesn't help that one of the labor group's registered lobbyists this year is former House Speaker Bill DeWeese, one of the four lawmakers' whose corruption conviction is now emblazoned beneath his portrait on the Capitol hallway.

The state's budget woes have been all but overshadowed, however, by the saga of Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane, criticized for her handling of both the Turnpike and the Philadelphia sting cases. Kane herself now stands accused (in part by her own staffers) of perjury, attempting to retaliate against critics by leaking secret grand jury information and then lying about it. The state Supreme Court has suspended her law license for 30 days, but Harrisburg is reeling over her plan to release hundreds of sexually explicit emails shared by state officials and employees on government time and computers. The first batch, a set of about 50 including sexual jokes and photos of nude women, were sent to and from the email account of one of the Supreme Curt justices. The stash was leaked to a Philadelphia newspaper before its official release by Kane on the first day of her suspension. Kane had said in a statement that she is making an effort to "root out the culture of misogyny and racially/religiously offensive behavior that has permeated law enforcement and members of the judiciary in this commonwealth for years."  Kane has maintained that she will not be hampered from continuing as Pennsylvania's top law enforcement officer while her license is suspended, but the state Senate has begun to investigate impeachment procedings.Wolf, who earlier said he believed Kane should step down, to no avail, now says he will defer to the Senate's decision.

Kauffman of Common Cause said that the part of the problem is that Pennsylvania's legislature, which passed an independent counsel law in the wake of an earlier attorney general scandal, allowed the measure to expire. "Had it been in place, we wouldn't have the political circus that the Kathleen Kane case has become," Kauffman said.

The state's Ethics Commission, he said, does as good a job as it can do with the resources and powers that it has. But as of late December 2014, the Commission had 11 vacancies on a staff of 27. Penalties and restitution levied were down 44 percent because compliance reviews and investigations had fallen. All of this led to a grade of F in the category of ethics enforcement.

Real people, real impact 

The state’s political experts differ on whether Harrisburg's gridlock is due to the corrupting influence of money in politics or the same kind of partisan differences that have stalled action on so many issues in the U.S. Congress. But there's no question it is having real impact on the lives of Pennsylvanians.

Nonprofits, which the state relies upon heavily to provide services such as day care and meals on wheels, are under strain as funding is delayed. Some school districts have had to borrow money or cut benefits to teachers. And beyond the budget woes, David Thornburgh, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Philadelphia watchdog group, the Committee of Seventy, argues that the economy in Pennsylvania has been weighed down by corruption. It's no coincidence, he thinks, that among the nation's ten most populous cities, Philadelphia has the lowest median income and the highest poverty rate at more than 25 percent.

"The way we approach politics is a political tax — a hidden cost of doing business," he said. Businesses and the people who work for them would prefer to locate to places where they are better assured that their tax dollars are being well spent, "and don't end up through a back channel in someone's pocket as payback," said Thornburgh. "I think there's a universal human attraction to places where government and politics work better."

Rhode Island has suffered from an inferiority complex dating back to colonial times, when Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather called it the “sewer of New England” and Connecticut tried to absorb the upstart colony. So it felt like just another blow this summer, when the former state House speaker landed in prison after pleading guilty to corruption- related charges.

First elected in 1992 and elevated to the state’s most powerful position in 2010, Gordon Fox had tip-toed through a series of scandals over the years — including an ethics fine, coziness with lobbyists and questions about his legal work for the City of Providence — before a federal corruption probe finally brought him down.

In June, Fox was sentenced to three years in prison after he admitted taking more than $50,000 in bribes from a Providence restaurant while serving on the city’s licensing board and using more than $100,000 in campaign money for personal expenses, including purchases at Tiffany’s and Urban Outfitters.

Reflecting on his downfall and the latest blow to Rhode Island’s tattered reputation, Fox quoted Hamlet at his sentencing – “thou canst not then be false to any man” – and added, “I hope this doesn’t create so much more cynicism that we keep good people [from] running for elected office.”

Sadly, Fox was not the only lawmaker to run afoul of the law this past year. In May, a state representative pleaded no contest to misusing campaign funds. He paid a $1,000 fine and resigned a leadership position, but remains in office.

The cases reflect a seedy political culture that persists despite some improvements to transparency in recent years, such as strengthening the open records law in 2012. It’s no surprise, then, that Rhode Island earned a grade of D+ in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven assessment of state government accountability and transparency conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. The state’s grade did rank it 5th best in the nation, but that speaks more to greater problems elsewhere than a tailwind of progress in the Ocean State.

Rhode Island’s score actually declined from the first investigation, in 2012, when the state earned a C that ranked it 9th. The two scores are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the questions and methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

Behind closed doors

Secrecy has long been a problem in Rhode Island, particularly in the annual closed-door deliberations in which legislative leaders hammer out the budget after months of public hearings.

In February, newly elected Gov. Gina Raimondo told a conference on state government in Washington that, “for too long,” legislative leaders and lobbyists have gathered “in the dark of night, in a quiet room,” to carve up the budget. Her comments drew an angry rebuke from the speaker, whose support is critical to passing a budget.

But critics of the budget process say the governor spoke the truth. Once leaders release the final budget proposal, all that’s left is essentially an up-or-down vote by the rank-and-file. The public doesn’t learn details until it’s too late to make any changes.

Prominent scandals and anemic reforms

In the wake of Fox’s conviction, reformers pushed for legislation to tighten campaign-finance reporting and strengthen oversight of lobbyists. The effort led to a new law passed this year that requires candidates to submit their campaign bank statements, making it harder to lie about how much money they have in their accounts.

But the law keeps those records secret, relying on an understaffed elections board, funded by the General Assembly, to find irregularities. When WPRI news asked all 112 members of the General Assembly for their campaign bank records in March, legislative leaders emailed House members to say they supported keeping the bank records private. In the end, only 24 lawmakers provided the records.

“The Senate president and speaker of the House have a lot of power to punish members who don’t go along with what they want: legislative grants, committee assignments, literally parking spaces,” John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, told WPRI at the time.

Even such incremental progress has proven elusive when it comes to lobbyist oversight. Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea took office in January vowing to clean up Rhode Island’s tangled patchwork of lobbying laws, strengthen her office’s oversight and stiffen penalties for violations. Again, it was a scandal involving Fox that fueled her efforts.

In 2010, the speaker pushed through an economic development loan program without revealing that $75 million was ticketed for 38 Studios, a video game company founded by former Boston Red Sox star Curt Schilling. Fox had agreed to help finance the company after meeting in secret with Michael Corso, a friend and business associate who was working for 38 Studios.

Corso had failed to register as a lobbyist, but because of the state’s weak and vague lobbying laws, the most the state could do was order him to register retroactively or pay a $2,000 fine. Corso refused and took the state to court. The new secretary of state dropped the matter this year, concluding that the weakness of the law undermined the state’s case.

Despite the loan, 38 Studios went bankrupt in 2012, sticking taxpayers with the bill. The episode caused lasting damage to public trust in government and undermined its efforts to boost a stagnant economy. But the legislature failed to pass any bills that would have fixed the lobbying laws before adjourning in June. Common Cause’s Marion says that leaders were reluctant to give the secretary of state subpoena power to investigate lobbyists.

Ethical dilemmas

One surprising bright spot for Rhode Island is the state’s ethics enforcement regime. The Ocean State has a muscular code of ethics that applies to all branches of government, and the state Ethics Commission can adopt new rules without having to go to the legislature. Those strengths and others led the state to earn a C+ in that category, the best in the nation.

The grade comes despite two notable setbacks in recent years, however. In 2009, a state Supreme Court decision exempted lawmakers from prosecution for ethics violations tied to their legislative duties after judges ruled that the work is protected by the state constitution’s speech-in-debate clause. And over the past three years, the Ethics Commission has stopped posting officials’ annual financial disclosure forms on its website, a response to complaints from legislators during the commission’s budget hearings, according to Ross Cheit, the commission’s chairman. The commission plans hearings on new rules to put the disclosures back online.

Still, the Ethics Commission remains an effective body, unlike many of its peers in other states. Common Cause’s Marion points out that it was a citizen’s complaint that led to the criminal case that toppled Fox, involving his legal work for the City of Providence.

“Rhode Island has had a long and storied history of corruption,” Marion said. “As a result, people demanded some very good ethics and public integrity laws. The struggle going forward is to see that they are effectively enforced.”

South Carolina is the kind of place where change only comes after a massive shock to the system. The state where the Civil War began takes threats to tradition seriously. During the early 19th Century, political disputes were settled at dawn with pistols. One governor, John Lyde Wilson, even wrote the definitive 1838 treatise on the subject: The Code of Honor, Or Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Dueling.

Later means of battle included canes — like the one that pro-slavery U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks used to bash the skull of the abolitionist Charles Sumner in 1856 — and wrestling — like the moves that U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond put on Ralph Yarborough in 1964 in an attempt to prevent the pro-civil rights Texas senator from voting at a confirmation hearing.

South Carolina politics may be less violent today, but state legislators still cling tenaciously to doing things the old way – even when other states have moved on. South Carolina is one of only two states where judges are elected by the legislature and one of only a handful that don’t require public officials to disclose private income. As a host of reform advocates have said, South Carolina is still very much a “Wild West.”

So it’s no surprise that South Carolina earned a D- in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity, ranking the state 36th out of 50. That’s a marginal improvement from 2012, the first time the project was carried out, when the Palmetto State scored an F. The two scores are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the project and methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

The project also found that South Carolina has a particularly high “enforcement gap,” which measures the difference between what the laws say and how well they’re actually implemented.

In some cases, this is obvious. The law says you can’t use campaign funds to defray personal expenses. The reality is that former House Speaker Bobby Harrell pleaded guilty last year to misusing campaign funds for personal benefit.

The law gives citizens access to information, but legislators not only find ways to work around releasing documents, but also discourage people from requesting them – either by charging exorbitant amounts or threatening to punish people who make “excessive” requests.

After South Carolina received an F in 2012, the state seemed poised for change. Gov. Nikki Haley and legislators all said they were committed to reform— Haley even cited the State Integrity Investigation score in her 2013 state of the state address.

But it quickly became clear that change wouldn’t come easy. Numerous reform bills have gone nowhere—even with Harrell’s downfall, which many thought would finally spur change.

Haley’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Good-government groups say the grade seems fitting.

"The fact that the score has changed very little is appropriate," said Lynn Teague, vice-president of the South Carolina League of Women Voters. "South Carolina still lacks effective ethics law."

No brakes on political campaigns

South Carolina once had clear limits on the amount of money that people could spend on politics. But in 2010, a federal judge upended all of that when he ruled that the state’s definition of a political committee was “unconstitutionally overbroad.” The ruling effectively opened the floodgates to unregulated donations. While limits on contributions to candidates remain, donors are now free to give unlimited sums to political parties, committees and politically active nonprofits. What’s more, contributions to any of those entities aren’t even subject to mandatory disclosure.

In 2013, for example, a New York real estate investor named Howard Rich was able to give more than $150,000 to a couple of dozen candidates for state legislature, circumventing the $1,000 cap on donations to candidates by funneling the money through an array of limited liability corporations, according to a report by The State.

The flood of cash has only highlighted the state’s vague rules for how candidates can spend that money. When Harrell, the former House speaker, pleaded guilty last year to six counts of using campaign funds for personal purposes, he admitted to using the funds to reimburse himself for flights on his private plane that weren’t official business.

But he also told the court that he had “a fundamental disagreement over the proper use of a campaign account.” He was able to avoid jail by agreeing to give up his House seat, stay out of politics for three years, and cooperate with an ongoing investigation into corruption in the legislature.

Advocates saw the case as a clear sign that the state’s laws and oversight are inadequate.

“For years, the House and Senate were on public notice from Harrell’s disclosure forms that his use of political money was out of control,” wrote John Crangle, executive director of the advocacy group Common Cause South Carolina, in a column for the news website The Nerve. Despite the clear warning, he wrote, no one “took any official actions to try to stop Harrell’s abusive conduct.”

Not all bad news

South Carolina scored among the best in the nation for its internal auditing practices — which covers both the department responsible for the annual financial audit of state agencies, and the new Office of Inspector General.

The Inspector General’s office, created in 2012, is free to investigate any department of the administrative branch of state government. The office established a fraud hotline, and investigators quickly got to work digging into several troubled areas.  

One of the office’s first reports showed that a majority of physicians aren’t properly monitoring drug prescriptions, and could lead to new safeguards to keep prescription drugs from falling into the wrong hands.

"I have broad latitude to go wherever I want, whenever I want and however I want,” said Inspector General Patrick Maley.

That ability makes the new office stand out from other state watchdog agencies. Both the ethics and elections commissions, for example, will respond to complaints, but they aren’t sufficiently funded to either perform regular audits or to initiate independent investigations.

This gap—along with the state’s lack of disclosure laws – has shielded the political process from close scrutiny, and kept the status quo securely in place.

Every year, 105 lawmakers and hundreds of lobbyists make the trek to South Dakota’s lonely capital city of 14,000 residents. Situated 34 miles from the nearest interstate highway, Pierre feels tiny and isolated, even by the standards of this remote plains state.

It’s in this cloistered environment that legislators and lobbyists commingle in the Capitol and in Pierre’s hotels and bars, wining, dining and even dancing the jitterbug together to fast-paced country music at the Ramkota Hotel’s RiverCentre Tavern.

It’s a comfortable atmosphere and an outgrowth of the state’s rural character. And little to none of it is reported to the public in any detail.

The state’s weak lobbying disclosure is among the reasons why South Dakota received an overall grade of F, or a numerical score of 56 out of 100, in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven assessment of government transparency and accountability by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. South Dakota suffered failing grades in nine of the investigation’s 13 categories, including lobbying disclosure, ranking it 47th in the nation overall. A lonely bright spot is the category of internal auditing, for which the state earned a B-.

The grade changed little from the project’s first go-round in 2012, when South Dakota’s overall score of 50 was second worst among the states. The two scores are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the questions and methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

Across the board, the state lacks robust laws to prevent corruption, apparently the result of a sense, at least among South Dakota’s ruling class, that burdensome controls are not needed in a rural state with a supposedly high degree of familiarity, trust and cordiality.

Tony Venhuizen, chief of staff to Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard, referred to that oft-repeated defense when told of the state’s poor showing in the investigation.

“According to Gallup, South Dakotans' trust in their state government is among the highest in the nation, and the state has very little history of corruption,” Venhuizen said in an emailed statement. “That's why our state hasn't enacted some of these measures.”

Some support for that sentiment comes from the investigation’s finding of a wide but unusual enforcement gap, a measure of the difference between the laws and how they're actually implemented, which suggests South Dakota government actually goes beyond what the law calls for when it comes to ethics and disclosure.

That’s of little solace, however, to Democratic state Rep. Peggy Gibson.

“I’m embarrassed that we have such a low standing,” she said after learning of South Dakota’s overall score.

Lobbyists scrawl ‘none’ on reports

South Dakota suffered its lowest score in the lobbying disclosure section, for which its numerical score of 40 was second worst in the nation. Jody Severson, who operates the political consulting firm Severson & Associates, offered a three-word summary of South Dakota’s lobbying disclosure in an email interview: “It’s a joke.”

The state requires lobbyists and their employers to file just one annual expense report, due three months after each legislative session. The loopholes are so broad and the scrutiny so lax that some lobbyists disclose nothing more than their identity and their employer.

State law requires the disclosure of “all costs incurred for the purpose of influencing legislation,” but the law exempts “personal expenses of the lobbyist spent upon the lobbyist's own meals, travel, lodging, phone calls or other necessary personal needs while in attendance at the legislative session.”

Many lobbyists interpret the exemption broadly. In the space for “expense information” on the one-page form provided by the secretary of state, some filers simply scrawl the word “none.” They can do so with impunity because the reports are not audited.

What’s more, the state makes it difficult for the public to review even these minimal disclosures.  The expense report documents are not viewable online and are available only by special request.

When lobbyists do list expenses on their disclosures, they provide only the expense dates, amounts and a general descriptive term such as “meals” or “entertainment.” A separate annual registration form requires little more than contact information and the lobbyist’s “subject of interest.” Neither lobbyists nor their employers are required to disclose lobbied bill numbers, nor are they required to list salaries.

Lest any filers try to voluntarily disclose their compensation, the expense form includes a bolded warning: “DO NOT include a lobbyist salary or fee.”

Revival of ethics commission fails

The notion that personal familiarity and trust is enough to regulate government pervades South Dakota’s approach to ethics as well. The state lacks an independent ethics agency covering all branches of government, a fact that contributed to its F grade in the ethics enforcement category.

A recent episode highlighted how little appetite there is for greater oversight. After former state cabinet secretary Richard Benda committed suicide in October 2013, details of his involvement in a previously unknown and wide-ranging scandal tumbled out for more than a year, casting suspicion on other top officials, too.

It soon emerged that Benda had been facing a possible grand jury indictment of felony theft for allegedly directing $550,000 in state grant money toward his future employer to cover his own salary, and for double-billing the state for economic development trips. All of this had allegedly grown out of a federal program that offers green cards to immigrants in exchange for job-creating investments.

The scandal ultimately touched former governor Mike Rounds, a Republican who had appointed Benda and was running an ultimately successful campaign for U.S. Senate by the time the scandal broke, and Joop Bollen, the state director of the federal program, who, it emerged, had arranged a secret state contract with his own private company worth millions. Rounds faced questions about the scandal during his campaign and was alternately accused of not divulging his knowledge of Benda and Bollen’s activities, or not knowing enough about what was going on in his administration. He maintained that he had no knowledge of anything improper regarding Benda, Bollen or the EB-5 program until he was contacted by investigators.

A legislative committee consisting of eight Republican and two Democratic lawmakers conducted hearings on the scandal last year. The panel’s Republican leadership declined Democratic requests to use the committee’s subpoena power and instead allowed key witnesses, including Rounds and Bollen, to answer questions by written correspondence. The committee eventually issued a report pinning all blame on Benda. Neither Bollen nor Rounds were found officially responsible for any wrongdoing.

This year, dissatisfaction with the hearings led Democratic lawmakers to push for reinstatement of the state’s Ethics Commission, which was repealed in 1979. The Republican majority laughed the bill out of the House on a 53-16 vote. During the House debate, one lawmaker, Republican Lee Schoenbeck, said that if an ethics commission could help combat corruption, then “I want a Tom Cruise commission to make us all strong and handsome.”

Gibson, the lawmaker who sponsored the legislation, said the Benda scandal showed that partisan legislators are incapable of serving as ethics watchdogs, highlighting the need for an independent ethics commission.

“It was pooh-poohed like we don’t have a problem with ethics in this state,” Gibson said of her bill. “I think we do have a problem.”

Tennessee adopted what were thought to be sweeping ethics reforms after four sitting state lawmakers were arrested on bribery charges. Ten years after the scandal rocked the legislature, however, there are questions about whether lawmakers have neutered the reforms and created loopholes as wide as the Tennessee River.

Political observers, moreover, say there are many ways to get around the state’s campaign finance regulations.

These are some of the reasons why this state of 6.5 million people earned a score of 66 and a grade of D from the 2015 State Integrity Investigation, an analysis of state transparency and accountability   conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity, ranking the state 15th. The grade represent a drop from the C Tennessee received in the project’s first go-round in 2012, but the two scores are not directly comparable; the new survey did not look into redistricting, which occurs only once every 10 years, for example, and additional questions were added on open data standards and election oversight.

The state Ethics Commission was created in a special legislative session in 2006, a year after four sitting lawmakers were charged with taking bribes in an FBI undercover operation known as the Tennessee Waltz.

New rules were imposed on lobbyists, and they were banned from donating to political candidates. But the law still allows a lobbyist to be the treasurer of a political action committee, or PAC, and decide how money is distributed. And a lobby firm can set up its own PAC to give money to candidates.

“In other words, they set up superficial rules that are easily bypassed,” said Tom Humphrey, a veteran political reporter who writes for the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Two opinions in six years

The six-member Ethics Commission has issued only two advisory opinions in six years. And the commission was paralyzed in the face of a request in the spring of 2015, when the National Rifle Association asked for a formal opinion.

The NRA was getting ready to host its annual convention at the Music City Center in downtown Nashville and country singer Alan Jackson and comedian Jeff Foxworthy were performing in town. A lawyer for the gun-rights organization asked whether the NRA could give free concert tickets to a select group of state lawmakers.

But in the face of a request from an organization that holds much sway among lawmakers in the state legislature, which has a Republican supermajority and is decidedly pro-gun, the commission’s members deadlocked. No formal opinion was issued.

Ethics commissions are sometimes loath to make waves with lawmakers, said Dave Boucher, who writes about politics for The Tennessean and formerly covered the West Virginia statehouse.

“They don’t want to make them too upset, because if they do they can lose a significant amount of their funding, and that funding can go toward investigations, staffing or anything else that they do,” Boucher said. “So this idea that it is an independent governmental watchdog is a little bit misleading, in that it is funded by the lawmakers [whom] it is charged to oversee.”

Limits – and loopholes

When it comes to political financing in the Volunteer State, there are limits on donations to political candidates and limits on how much money candidates can get from PACs. But there are plenty of ways around these restrictions.

“If you’ve got the money, you’re going to be able to find a way to spend it in a campaign,” said Humphrey, of the News Sentinel.

Part of this is a function of federal law and recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to convince voters to support or defeat a candidate. Tennessee is seeing an increasing number of super PACS as a result, Humphrey said.

There is no limit in Tennessee on how much one can give to a political party or a PAC. And what’s spent on “educational” advertising, which often comes in the form of attack ads, doesn’t count as a campaign contribution as long as the ad doesn’t explicitly say  “vote for” or “vote against” a candidate.

“What they will do,” Humphrey said, “is they will put out an ad that says, ‘This representative is a lying, worthless, no-account politician. She loves Obama. She’s for a state income tax. We thought you ought to know. Call her. Here’s her phone number in her office. Tell here that you’re against Obamacare and she shouldn’t be for it anymore, etc., etc.’ And this is right before an election.”

In Tennessee, lawmakers are also allowed to use campaign funds to buy tickets to professional sporting events, providing the purchase is described as a legitimate expense for an election or officeholder activity or the tickets are given to “students attending schools, guests or constituents of the candidate or officeholder, or persons involved in the candidate's or officeholder's campaign,” The Tennessean reported.

“On the surface, it makes it look like these exemptions are so broad that you can buy tickets for anybody,” said Boucher, who wrote the story for the newspaper.

Weak open records law, strong audits

There also are questions about the state’s open records and open meetings laws. The Tennessee Court of Appeals has ruled that the legislature is not subject to the open meetings law. The advisory committee that serves the Office of Open Records Counsel, which acts as a resource for citizens looking for records, is not subject to the open records law.

The irony of this was not lost on citizen activist Ken Jakes, who complained that the committee was conducting its business out of public view.

“This is the Open Records Counsel, the very one that’s supposed to be telling us that we’re supposed to be having open records,” Jakes said.

At press time, the Tennessee Supreme Court was considering a lawsuit brought by a number of media organizations that could have a dramatic impact on how much information a law enforcement agency can make public during an investigation. Open-records advocates fear that a decision in favor of law enforcement could tempt officials to withhold details on a matter of public safety or even police corruption simply because a case was under investigation.

Tennessee did get high marks in the State Integrity Investigation for its audits. Almost daily, the Division of Audit under the state comptroller chronicles theft, fraud, abuse and waste on the part of state and local government employees. In the Volunteer State, that amounts to a silver lining.

In his first State of the State address to the Texas Legislature in early 2015, newly elected Gov. Greg Abbott challenged lawmakers to dedicate their unfolding 140-day session to ethics reform, asserting that “the most important commodity that we have as elected officials is the bond that we share with our constituents.”

“Transparency — and rising above the appearance of impropriety — will strengthen that bond,” Abbott asserted. “But rejection of ethics reform could weaken that bond and rightfully raise suspicions about who we truly serve — ourselves, or the people of Texas.”

If the GOP governor’s reading of the public’s attitude was on the mark, then chances are that Texans are more suspicious than ever. Instead of enacting the first sweeping ethics reforms in nearly a quarter-of-a-century, members of the 84th Legislature ended their session by passing only a handful of mostly modest ethics bills.

More far-reaching measures, including a host of provisions championed by Abbott, collapsed in a House-Senate stalemate in the final hours before the session adjourned. Buried in the impasse: proposals to boost transparency on wining and dining by lobbyists, toughen limited public disclosure requirements for state officials and candidates, and shine a light on millions of dollars in undisclosed donations to politically active nonprofits.

The paltry body of work on one of the governor’s top priorities enhanced the state’s reputation as a place where — at least in the eyes of watchdog groups — lip service on ethics trumps actual results. Lurking in the background are indictments against former Gov. Rick Perry — who stands charged with abuse of power after he vetoed funding to a local district attorney’s office in what some argued was a political dispute — and the current attorney general, who faces securities fraud charges stemming from his private work while he was a member of the state House of Representatives. Both have pleaded not guilty, and a judge tossed one of two charges against Perry.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that the state earned a grade of D- in the latest State Integrity Investigation, a national assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity.

Texas ranked 38th out of 50, suggesting that the nation’s second-largest state — a powerhouse of high growth and economic prosperity — may be heading in the wrong direction when it comes to ethics and other measures of government integrity. In the first State Integrity Investigation, published in March 2012, the Lone Star State ranked 27th with an overall grade of D+.

The two scores are not directly comparable, due to changes made to update the project and methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that occurs only once every 10 years. Nonetheless, the 2015 survey shows Texas hovering just above a failing grade, underscoring the view that the state’s ethics infrastructure is in need of repair.

"There were high hopes that there was going to be lots of ethics reform and improvements but it turned out to be just the opposite,” said Craig McDonald, director of the liberal-leaning Texans for Public Justice, an Austin-based advocacy group that was part of a coalition pushing an ambitious ethics agenda this year.

After being informed of the latest State Integrity findings, Cait Meisenheimer, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Abbott would redouble his efforts to “boost Texans' trust in state government and strengthen our state’s ethics laws in a meaningful way.” She added that “while some legislation was passed and signed to address this, Governor Abbott believes Texans deserve better and that the State of Texas must further address ethics reform in the next session - the right way.”

For the moment, though, ethics advocates and watchdog groups are still struggling to overcome their setbacks in 2015. “It wasn’t a very rosy session for ethics and reform,” McDonald said.

Tangled history leads to a “goony bird” agency

Texas is no stranger to scandals, some of which have played out in flamboyant, “everything-is-bigger in Texas” style. The epic Sharpstown Stock Fraud Scandal rocked Texas in the early 1970s following the disclosure that state officials had profited from manipulated stock purchases. Scores of political incumbents, even those not directly implicated in the scandal, saw their careers end in a throw-the-rascals-out backlash that turned over more than half the seats in the state House.

In the same era, one northern Texas lawmaker converted $1,995 in stamps from his office account toward the purchase of a 1971 half-ton pickup, ultimately pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts in a plea-bargain to avoid a trial on felony charges. In 1989, chicken magnate Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim stirred an outcry for tougher campaign finance laws by passing out $10,000 checks in the Senate chamber.

Outrage over Pilgrim’s political largesse helped make ethics a top priority in the 1991 legislative session under then-Gov. Ann Richards, who outlined 13 specific requirements topped by a proposed ethics commission. In the end, Richards got less than half of what she asked for and the ethics commission, ultimately ratified by voters in a constitutional amendment, was considered so weak and susceptible to legislative interference that watchdog groups and major newspapers unsuccessfully called for a gubernatorial veto. “A Lousy Ethics Law,” lamented a Houston Post editorial, predicting that the commission would be tantamount to a “fox guarding the henhouse.”

The commission has been consistently scorned as being weak and ineffective since it was created. Even the current chairman and immediate past chairman, who ethics advocates widely agree have pushed the body on a more aggressive path, acknowledge the panel’s shortcomings. Chairman Paul Hobby described it as “goony bird of an agency” because of its even-numbered eight-member makeup — four Republicans and four Democrats — as well as other factors, but he said the agency “does the best it can with the money it’s given.”

During the 2015 legislative session, Jim Clancy, the previous chairman and still a commission member, wrote in a letter to Hobby that the agency “faces an Ethics emergency” because it is unable to enforce its orders in court due to a unique statutory restriction that effectively forces the ethics entity to build a brand new case anytime someone appeals a fine it has levied. The restriction, Clancy said, has prevented the commission from fighting a district court’s decision to toss out a $10,000 fine that the agency levied against conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan for failing to register as a lobbyist.

The commission “is like a traffic cop standing in the middle of an intersection with a whistle,” Clancy said. “He has no gun, he has no patrol car, all he can do is stand there and blow the whistle until help arrives.” The state received a category score of 62 on ethics enforcement.

Unlimited spending

A pervasive theme exposed in the State Integrity Investigation was the impact of unlimited campaign contributions and expenditures in shaping what some ethics advocates alleged was a pattern of cronyism during Perry’s 14 years as the state’s longest serving governor.

Texas is one of about a dozen states that permit unlimited individual campaign contributions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The result, according to McDonald, of Texans for Public Justice, is that “a small minority of citizens control a huge amount of the political money in the state.”  McDonald said his organization has documented “time and time again” that the 200 wealthiest campaign contributors generally supply about 40 percent of the money.

“Texas has a culture of corruption that starts at the very top,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, who has been director of Public Citizen’s Texas office since 1985 and helped lead the push for ethics reforms both in 1991 and this year. Under what he called a “pay-to-play” system that he said “exemplified the Perry administration,” Smith said big donors were often rewarded with appointments to boards and commissions that shaped policy on state government.

Perry appointed more than 5,000 people to boards and commissions during his record-setting tenure, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Nearly $23 million — or about 21 percent — of the $109.8 million in donations that Perry received from 2000 to 2013 came from 1,187 Perry appointees and their spouses, according to Texans for Public Justice data compiled for a Sept. 22, 2014, Austin-American Statesman report.

Perry representatives did not return requests for comment, but Ray Sullivan, a former chief of staff and longtime adviser to the former governor, said Perry “named thousands of appointees who were vetted and confirmed by the Texas Senate, subject to strict ethics and disclosure laws, and served in most cases without pay.”

Ethics enforcers worry that dollar-driven politics could ultimately have a destructive effect. Hobby, the Ethics Commission chairman, said the sheer scale of donations lead some to think it’s only a matter of time before the next big scandal. Gregg Cox, director of the Public Integrity Unit at the Travis County District Attorney’s office, put it more simply: “There’s way too much money.”

Utah is a study in contradictions. Against the backdrop of breathtaking vistas from the northern Wasatch Range to the red rock arches and mesas in southern national parks, Utah projects Hollywood images of western individualism.

Yet, despite an image of rugged independence, Utah politics is dominated by a unique brand of consensus conservatism. Because Republicans hold all statewide elected offices and the GOP has a super-majority grip on the legislature, many important decisions in the state get vetted as party matters rather than the public’s business.

Whether it’s redistricting, closed Republican Senate caucuses, secretive Medicaid expansion discussions or a lack of political campaign contribution limits, state Republican leaders often see no-holds-barred political spending and consensus-building as more important than transparency.  

That means open government in Utah sometimes gets short shrift. As recently as 2011, lawmakers voted to gut the state’s open records law in just a few days with little public debate. Boisterous public outcry from across the political spectrum pushed lawmakers back into a special session to undo their actions.  Even so, Utah  gets only a C- category grade for access to information in the 2015 State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven assessment by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. Stunningly, that grade actually ranked Utah tied for 2nd in the nation— but at least one observer said that’s nothing to aspire to.

“It’s actually quite disheartening,” said Linda Petersen, president of the Utah Foundation for Open Government. “It is astonishing that our government still largely operates in the shadows. And things are only getting worse.”

Added McKenzie Romero, president of the Utah Headliners chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists: “Utah is a state that shines in so many ways, why shouldn't information access be one of them?"

Indeed. Utah got failing grades in seven of the State Integrity Investigation’s 13 categories. Overall, the Beehive State Utah ranked 25th among all states, with a grade of D-. That was actually a ranking improvement from the first State Integrity Investigation in 2012, when Utah ranked 36th. The two scores are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the questions and methodology, such as eliminating the category of redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

Failing grades

Even as Utah lawmakers say they have fixed legal flaws to prevent another pay-to-play scandal like the one that has been alleged against Utah’s two former attorneys general, rankings shows that the state’s laws on political finance, lobbying disclosure and ethics enforcement still earn scores that equal an F when compared with best practices.

“My final surprise is that lobbying disclosure and ethics enforcement aren’t even lower,” said Josh Kanter, chairman and founder of the good government group Alliance for a Better Utah.

But Kanter praised the accessibility of the campaign finance data that is collected through Utah’s lieutenant governor’s office, which doubles as the state elections office. “It is my general belief that what the Utah lieutenant governor’s office provides is really quite good,” he said.

Utah’s scores also suffered because it has no limits on campaign contributions.

High marks for budget process 

Despite low grades in campaign finance and lobbyist disclosure, Utah’s focus on making its budget process more accessible and understandable got high marks. Utah’s state budget process was the only category in which the state received an A.

Even on that score there are criticisms. Kanter noted that the high grade “ignore[s] how much is done in the legislative session at the last minute that impacts the budget in ways that people don’t see coming.”

Utah does have a handful of online resources to help citizen watchdogs keep an eye on the state’s coffers and monitor other performance measures. For example, a new website, opendata.Utah.gov, shows promise in allowing residents to do their own analysis of a host of government programs. In addition, Utah’s independent auditing safeguards received a B and the openness of Utah’s procurement system got a B-.

Accountability 

One consistent problem across several categories: Utah does not require detailed financial disclosures for the state’s top elected officials, legislators, judges, career civil service employees and their family members. That may have hurt the rankings for Utah’s judiciary, which is otherwise considered a leader in openness.

Jeff Hunt, a Utah attorney who specializes in media law and open government issues, expressed surprise at the low marks for Utah’s courts. “The courts fully appreciate,” he said, that public trust depends on public access and understanding of the judicial process.”

Maybe, just maybe, Vermont is on the verge of being dragged into the modern world of government transparency and oversight.

Not because the Green Mountain State is corrupt. By almost all accounts, it is not.

Despite its abysmal score — a 60, or D-, 39th in the country— in the latest State Integrity Investigation, an assessment of state government accountability and transparency conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity, Vermont’s state government may be among the cleanest in the land. No one alive can recall even a whiff of suspicion — much less an actual allegation — of high-level bribery. Former Vermont governors don’t get hedge fund gigs. Defeated legislators do not reappear in the Statehouse as well-heeled lobbyists in thousand-dollar suits.

So what might be inspiring a new attitude?

Well, probably not the study score, though that is likely to become part of the discussion. Truth to tell, Vermont did almost as badly the first time around in 2012, when it garnered a D+. The grades are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the project and methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

Back in 2012, the response of state officials in the tidy capital city of Montpelier (and, so far as can be determined, the general public) was that Vermont needed neither laws nor agencies to prevent corruption and encourage transparency. In this tiny state of 630,000 souls, personal relationships, a tradition of ramrod rectitude, and old-fashioned New England reticence (or maybe, as one lobbyist put it, “we don’t have that much to steal,”) were seen as good enough.

And perhaps they were. But recent events have started to shake those comfy assumptions. Two years ago, the state’s chief telecommunications regulator quit to join one of the companies her agency regulated, a rather un-Vermont thing to do. This past July, the head of the state’s EB5 Regional Center resigned to go to work for Mount Snow, the resort trying to raise more than $50 million through that federal program, which grants permanent U.S. residence to foreigners who make job-creating investments in American projects.

Then, in May, came the arrest, right at the Statehouse, of state Sen. Norman McAllister on charges of sexual assault. Technically, these allegations have nothing to do with government ethics; the Franklin County Republican, who has pleaded not guilty, is charged with abusing women who worked for him in the private sector. But the political impact was immediate and unmistakable, with both editorialists and elected officials — including Gov. Peter Shumlin — endorsing the creation of an ethics commission.

Beyond the law

On other fronts, the State Integrity Investigation seems to signal a curious sort of ambivalence in Vermont — a paucity of laws codifying transparency, but a general respect for how business was being done regardless, at least as far as anyone can tell. Indeed, the project suggests that officials and agencies may follow many good-government principles even when the law does not require it.

Take, for example, the state’s score on its pension system. The number is 61, a D-, but is that because Vermont’s public employee pension system is troubled?

Hardly. By an objective standard, the system is exemplary. Its investments are highly rated and secure. The investment process is transparent. Representatives of the public employee unions — actual workers — sit on the investment committee, protecting the interests of present and future retirees.

But there is no law requiring those committee members to disclose all their assets. So citizens can’t see where there might be conflicts.  There is also no law preventing a committee member from leaving his or her job and making big bucks at a pension investment firm.

No committee member has done so. But if one did, it would not violate any law.

Or consider the rather poor grade (70, or a C-) given to the state’s auditing practices. The Office of the State Auditor is generally held in high regard. But the law gives it no power to audit the legislative or judicial branches, or to get involved where criminal activity is suspected (the attorney general’s office investigates these cases).

The auditing function also lost some points because the auditor, who is elected, may and does choose the senior staff, meaning those staff members are not “longstanding civil servants legally protected from arbitrary dismissal or transfer.”

Whether that should be considered a lack of political independence or simply a function of democracy is open to debate. Allen Gilbert, the head of the Vermont ACLU and perhaps the state’s leading advocate of open government, opts for the latter interpretation. “I think because the auditor's office is a statewide elected position, it is assumed the state's voters are the watchdog,” he said. But a literal reading of the criteria required a lower score.

A mixed bag

Democracy may also clash with reform in regard to legislative accountability. Vermont is one of only three states in which lawmakers need not disclose their outside income, and though no polls have been taken on the subject, there is every reason to believe that most Vermonters don’t much mind. Part of that New England reticence is not caring how much your neighbors earn. In Vermont, legislators really are neighbors (there is a lawmaker for every 2,000 or so voters), and folks here seem to like it that way.

Vermont did not score badly in all areas. Thanks to a tradition of transparency in both the executive and legislative branches in regard to money matters (that old New England parsimony), it got an A for its budget process.  And when it comes to campaign finance, where both laws and administration have been tightened in the last few years, the state earned a B, the third highest grade in the country.

Elsewhere, though, Vermont’s scores ranged from a barely respectable C- to a deplorable F, including the lowest score of any state when it comes to ethics enforcement. No mystery there. Vermont has no ethics enforcement agency.

Central to all the low scores: a lack of asset disclosure requirements. Neither the governor nor the cabinet secretaries nor judges need make a full disclosure of assets or outside income. The Governor’s Executive Code of Ethics forbids officials from lobbying former colleagues for a year after leaving state employ. But it does not forbid them from going to work for the businesses they have been regulating. Nor does that code apply to the governor — and though it has the force of law, it is not statute. A future governor could simply abolish it, politically foolish (and therefore unlikely) though that would be.

Nor is there any law requiring state agencies to make information available to the public in “open data” format, which allows people to download and sort information. Some do, but it’s up to them.

An ethics commission of some kind may be created next year. Asset disclosure rules could take a little longer; that New England reticence business seems to be as much a part of the landscape here as covered bridges and Jersey cows.

But change seems to be coming, if slowly and reluctantly. Vermont probably still doesn’t have that much to steal. But stealing — as in outright bribery or kickbacks — has never been a problem here. What has changed is that in an increasingly centralized, government-subsidized economy come more opportunities to use government service as a stepping stone, creating the temptation to make decisions benefitting oneself more than the public.

That’s the problem with the modern world. It eventually arrives everywhere — even Vermont.

Virginia long claimed it had an ethical political culture based on a tradition of civic service, genial debate, and gentlemanly behavior – until events proved otherwise in 2014. That’s when the conviction of former Gov. Bob McDonnell on federal corruption charges rocked Old Dominion politics.

Evidence presented in court showed that McDonnell and his family accepted $177,000 in gifts and loans from Jonnie Williams, the then-CEO of a tobacco-turned-health-supplement company. At the time, neither the loans nor the gifts — rounds at a tony golf club, a $20,000 New York shopping spree for his wife, Maureen McDonnell, and a Rolex watch for the governor — were barred under state law. Virginia allowed unlimited gifts to its politicians, but required their disclosure.

McDonnell did not report most of Williams’ largesse, however, initially claiming they were exempt because the CEO was a close family friend and the gifts were primarily to his family. In the end, McDonnell was sentenced to two years in prison on 11 counts of public corruption, although his case is still working its way through the appellate courts.

The state legislature responded in March 2014 by passing the first limits on gifts for politicians and their family members. It created a new ethics council to collect and publish disclosure forms for all branches of government.

In April, the gift limits were lowered to $100, a change sought by McDonnell’s successor, Gov. Terry McAuliffe; the new limits will go into effect in January. “We took an important step forward to strengthen the ethics legislation that was passed last year by further increasing transparency and accountability,” McAuliffe said in a statement August 31.

These improvements to ethics laws and oversight played a part in Virginia earning a score of 66, ranking it 16th in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity.

Highlights

The creation of the new gift limits and the inclusion of lawmakers’ family members helped hike Virginia’s scores in several categories of the State Integrity Investigation. In 2012, Virginia scored 55 and came in at 47th out of the 50 states. The two scores are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the project and methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

Virginia also scored well in internal auditing and civil service, where it finished in third place, in part because of the creation of an inspector general’s office. This was a campaign promise of McDonnell’s. The Inspector General oversees a fraud, waste, and abuse tip hotline, and is empowered to investigate complaints as well as issues found by a separate auditor of public spending accounts. Evidence of any potential crimes is turned over to law enforcement.

Virginia ranked second in the category of procurement, partly because of the state’s readily accessible, web-based procurement disclosures. It offers a centralized database of procurement needs, bid winners and procurement rules and regulations.

State officials have “adopted the attitude that they want to be as pure as Caesar’s wife,” said Ron Jordan, executive director for the Virginia Governmental Employees Association, who worked in the executive and legislative branches for more than 20 years.

Enforcement weaknesses

Watchdogs and independent observers lament that shortfalls still exist in the ethics law. No procedures exist for auditing the newly-expanded disclosures, and the ethics council lacks authority to investigate or discipline any government officials.

Only lobbyists, their employers or people seeking contracts with a state agency are covered by the gift ban, allowing others seeking official backing for private gains to continue giving items of value to lawmakers. Paying for lawmakers’ travel to meetings is not barred, although it must be disclosed and approved by the ethics council. And the gift ban does not cover sponsorship of “widely attended events,” as well as gifts of food and beverages at events where a public official is “performing official duties related to his public service.” These exemptions leave the door open for privately subsidized gatherings, large and small, that may not be disclosed.

Virginia again scored poorly on information access, lobbying disclosure and political financing. The state’s Freedom of Information Act has many exemptions, notably including all work conducted by the major regulatory body for businesses, insurance, financial institutions, utilities and railroads, known as the State Corporation Commission. Elected officials can also invoke exemptions that cover working papers or correspondence.

But the issue that needs urgent attention, said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, is fees. “Under the law, state government and local governments can charge for labor,” she said. “Partly because of shrinking budgets, we have departments charging for records” that did not previously demand payment, while others have simply increased their fees.

Virginia has no limits on donations to state-level election campaigns or inaugural committees, with the consequence that donations exceeding $100 vastly outnumber smaller donations in state elections. And the Department of Elections has no authority to audit campaign finance reports.

Lobbying declarations similarly are not subject to audits, and lobbyists sometimes find creative ways to stay below a $50 threshold for reporting.  Multiple lobbyists have organized large events, for example, and split the costs among lobbyists and all the firms and businesses they work for. And when lobbyists do not make disclosures, legislators typically don’t either.

“Virginia’s laws rely on classical bribery, finding the quid pro quo,” said Dave Ress, reporter at the Daily Press newspaper, located in Newport News, Virginia. But such cases are few and far between, leaving much election financing in a gray zone. “If XYZ company drops $5,000 into a campaign fund, there’s a reason for that besides desiring good government. If a legislator [then] went along with a vote the company wanted, is that bribery?”

Immediately after a federal grand jury indicted Washington State Auditor Troy Kelley in April 2015 for tax evasion, perjury and other charges largely stemming from a business he ran before being elected, The Seattle Times declared him unfit to lead an office responsible for ensuring the integrity of public agencies and urged the Democrat to “quit, now.”

Kelley has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and is scheduled for trial in March.

The Times editorial took aim not only at Kelley’s alleged crimes – accusations which Kelley’s Republican rival had widely disseminated to the media before their 2012 race for the auditor post – but also the fact that his case tarnished Washington’s “well-deserved reputation for clean government.”

If such reputation is based on the rarity of public officials being found guilty of corruption in federal courts, then Washington could well claim to be one of the nation’s cleanest states. A 2012 report by the University of Illinois at Chicago, for instance, concluded that only Oregon had a lower per-capita rate for federal corruption convictions.

Yet Washington’s self-perception as a model state for government accountability and transparency doesn’t quite match up findings from the latest State Integrity Investigation carried out by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. Washington scored 67, or D+, which was good enough to rank it 12th in the nation. That’s a big fall from Washington’s No. 3 ranking in the 2012 State Integrity report. Because of scoring changes, the two results are not directly comparable, but they do suggest a worrying trend.

This time, Washington earned its worst category score, an F, for access to information. Only six states avoided a failing grade in that category. Washington enacted what became its Public Records Act by voter initiative in 1972. But even today, advocates say public servants regularly violate the most basic requirements for disclosure.

Washington also earned no better than a D- for accountability in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, based on such measures as cronyism, nepotism, financial disclosures and conflicts of interest.

Any notion of Washington’s exceptionalism in transparency and corruption was punctured by a 2014 New York Times investigation which reported that former state Attorney General Rob McKenna was secretly lobbying his former colleagues on behalf of Microsoft and other corporate clients within months of leaving office. A bill to ban revolving-door lobbying by government officials and top aides for one year after leaving their jobs failed to pass the 2015 legislative session in Olympia.

Washington’s best performance, ironically, was for internal audit – the very fraud watchdog agency headed by the disgraced Kelley. It scored an 87, good enough for a fourth-place tie with Alabama, Texas and Arizona. Washington also fared better than average for procurement and for political finance.

Brad Shannon, a veteran statehouse reporter who now is an opinion writer for The Olympian, sees Washington largely as a well-governed state where outright graft, corruption and scandals are rare. At the same time, Shannon frets that Washington may be slipping behind other states in keeping pace with technology to ensure easy access to public records, and perhaps growing too complacent about enacting safeguards to curb government secrecy and conflicts of interest.

Compounding Shannon’s worry is the shrinking corps of journalists based at the state capitol, and lean budgets that prevent agencies such as the Public Disclosure Commission from fully carrying out their oversight duties. Indeed, the PDC says it lacks the staffing to conduct regular audits of campaign contribution filings or government officials’ financial disclosure forms – meaning false or incomplete reporting can go unnoticed unless political rivals or the public flag them.

An apt description for Washington, Shannon says, may be, “one of the cleanest dirty shirts.”

Katherine George, a Seattle attorney and a member of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, is unsurprised by the state’s dismal grade for public disclosures. Widespread misperception persists, she says, that unreasonable delays in complying with open-records requests are permissible if based on staffing constraints.

“Often, agencies could eliminate backlogs if they devoted as much staffing to records disclosures as they do to public relations,” George says. Obtaining records would be faster and easier if agencies “worried less about over-disclosing, which is protected from liability, and worried more about under-disclosing.”

George is concerned Washington may be backsliding on its commitment to ensuring citizens’ access to government records and data. Washington’s Public Disclosure Act was originally enacted with fewer than a dozen exemptions for disclosures. The number of exemptions today stands at more than 400, and the total is growing.

Since 2007 Washington has had a blue-ribbon committee to make recommendations to the legislature about whether to repeal or amend any of the exemptions. Yet, in a not-uncommon move, the “Sunshine Committee” in August 2015 voted to give law enforcement authorities expanded authority to redact police reports.

If the legislature adopts it, the current exemption for minors who are victims of sex crimes will include all minors who are witnesses to crimes of any kind. That means, according to George, who serves on the Sunshine Committee, the public could not find out about bikes stolen from 17-year-olds, even though such crime statistics could be valuable information for public safety.

Similarly, efforts to give the public access to medical malpractice records have been stymied by opposition from hospitals and physicians and insurers.

All in all, those who follow Washington’s politics closely say the state has embraced the principles of open government. Still, Jason Mercier, director of the Center for Government Reform with the Washington Policy Center, a think tank, says greater transparency is warranted. Mercier pointed to the power tussle between Gov. Jay Inslee and the legislature over his legal authority to sidestep lawmakers to cap carbon emissions in the state through executive action.

The public needs to understand better the basis for such executive legal authority, Mercier says, and whether the legislature is providing the right balance of power.

Mercier says Washington has the laws and processes to work as a democratic, open government.

“The key comes to execution and adherence,” he says.

All last fall, televised political attack ads reverberated among the hills and hollers of West Virginia. It was part of a bitter fight between the two parties, and Republicans managed to ride to victory on a national wave of disapproval with politics in Washington D.C.

The results were seen as a Republican revolution, and Democrats lost control of the state Legislature for the first time in eight decades. But in the Mountain State, there was another story underneath it all.

The state was awash in new political spending, after the secretary of state decided it could no longer enforce the existing limits on contributions to independent political groups. The move came as part of a settlement in a lawsuit that had been filed in federal court arguing that the limits were unconstitutional.

 “To continue to press what is an unwinnable position,” Secretary of State Natalie Tennant said in a statement at the time, “will do nothing but run up the tab for which the state will be responsible.”

As it turned out, the Republican victory came in spite of the spending, not because of it — Democrats outspent Republicans nearly two-to-one in the state’s legislative races. But Tennant’s decision unleashed a torrent of spending that transformed the state’s politics and undermined what had been relatively muscular campaign finance laws.

This new reality, combined with the state’s weak open record laws, has resulted in West Virginia earning an overall grade of D, ranking the state 17th out of 50 in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity.

That represents little change from 2012, the first time the project was conducted, when the Mountain State earned a D+. The two scores are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the project and its methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years. The highest grade, a C, went to Alaska, while California and Connecticut each received a C-; the other 47 states received D’s and F’s.

Allegations of involuntary campaign contributions

Over the past few years, a series of reports in state and national media have detailed allegations of how Murray Energy, one of the nation’s leading coal mine operators and an employer of thousands in West Virginia, had been pressuring its employees to make political contributions to designated lists of candidates and to the company’s political action committee.

Murray Energy general counsel Mike McKown responded by saying that the firm’s approach to political contributions complies with federal laws and that CEO Robert E. Murray merely encouraged his employees to make contributions.

But in September 2014, a West Virginia shift foreman named Jean Cochenour filed suit in state circuit court, charging that she had been fired from her job at Murray because she had refused to make campaign contributions to the firm’s designated Republican candidates. In a statement, Murray Energy described Cochenour's allegations as "wholly without merit, and we will vigorously defend against her frivolous claims." The parties have since reached a settlement.

Either way, Murray and its employees have become prolific donors on the national level, pumping $3.6 million into national races since 2010, according the Center for Responsive Politics, with nearly all of that going to Republicans. In 2014, Murray Energy donated $250,000 to a pro-business, super PAC called Moving West Virginia Forward, which turned around and spent the money on mass mailings and phone calls in support of state legislative candidates, according to filings with the secretary of state.

However, there’s no indication that the secretary of state’s office initiated any investigation into the allegations of forced contributions to state legislative races. A spokesman for the office said state law forbids officials from commenting on any investigations into campaign misconduct.  The only time the agency makes an investigation public is after it has turned the case over to prosecutors and charges have been filed.

“It’s impossible for anyone to know whether the secretary of state conducted an investigation and found a candidate faultless or whether they just blew it off,” said Jack Rogers, a retired lawyer who spent 10 years as legislative staff counsel and 20 years as executive director of the state Public Defender Services agency.

Murray’s spending, however, was just one part of a much larger trend. Election spending more than tripled across state-level races from 2010 to 2014, to nearly $9.3 million, according to state records.

“I’m not sure any of us can survive this huge corporate spending,” said H. Truman Chafin, a former Democratic state senator who now practices law in Williamson, a town of 3,200 residents on the banks of the Tug Fork river in the heart of coal country. “And the sad thing to me is that the decent, competent people that we desperately need have no interest in going into politics.”

Mountain State wins – and loses

In the past few years, though, there have been some significant improvements in West Virginia on the accountability front. In 2014, the state Ethics Commission began conducting random audits of lobbyist spending reports for the first time since 2011.

But the state still has a long way to go regarding access to public information. West Virginia has no agency capable of enforcing its freedom of information act, and there’s no way to appeal a rejection short of going to court. Last year, for example, the Charleston Gazette was forced to sue the state attorney general’s office after it refused to produce records related to a potential conflict of interest for the attorney general, whose wife was lobbying for a pharmaceutical company that the state was suing. In September, a state judge ruled that the attorney general did not have to turn over the records.

West Virginia legislators are also exploring the creation of an independent inspector general's office that would be empowered to investigate corruption, waste and fraud in all state agencies. In other states, inspector general's offices have helped state governments identify millions of dollars in wasted taxpayer funds through improper contracting and outright fraud.

Lawmakers have said they expect to introduce a bill in January that would create such an office.

While Wisconsin voters tracked the doomed presidential ambitions of Republican Gov. Scott Walker this summer, legislators in Madison brawled over changes that Walker and his allies had proposed to the state’s open records law.

As a parched summer gave way to September in the state’s leafy capital on five lakes, the town was buzzing over news that weeks earlier, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had begun work to draft a bill that would exempt the Legislature’s two houses from the state’s records law. The draft would allow lawmakers to write their own rules governing whether their emails, memos and other documents, all currently considered public, would instead be shielded from view.

The move came to light only after a liberal advocacy group released emails about the plan that it obtained through a public records request. And the Vos effort came just weeks after a failed attempt by Republican leaders to add to a budget bill even broader exemptions from the open records law.

Immediately after the draft surfaced, Vos held a news conference to say his office had abandoned the effort for this session. "We're not changing the open records law,” Vos said.

But transparency advocates saw something more sinister. “I think what is happening is an aberration, and a major departure from past Wisconsin tradition,” said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a nonprofit advocacy group. “What we are seeing, for the first time in my experience, is the emergence of a culture of contempt for the public's right to know.”

The differences of opinion in the Badger State go beyond public records. Almost from the day Walker took office in 2011, the Republican-controlled Legislature has waged war on Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board — the latest iteration of a state ethics watchdog. The governor also led a successful push to strip most public employees of their collective bargaining rights.

All of this has contributed to Wisconsin earning a score of 64, or a D, placing it 20th among 50 in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity.

Over the past few weeks, both houses of the Legislature have also approved sweeping changes to the state's campaign finance laws and a bill that would dismantle the Government Accountability Board by splitting it into two agencies, though the Assembly must now approve versions of the bills passed by the Senate. Last month, Walker signed a law that prohibits prosecutors from using a form of secret investigation — known as a John Doe — to probe allegations of public corruption. None of the recent moves factor into Wisconsin's D grade because they came after the project's study period had ended.

Wisconsin earned a grade of C- in 2012, when the State Integrity Investigation was first carried out. The two scores are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the project and methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

The report also found that Wisconsin has a significant "enforcement gap," which measures the difference between the laws on the books and how well they’re actually implemented.

Laurel Patrick, a spokeswoman for Walker, said in an email that while she couldn’t comment on the new scores without seeing all the data behind them, “the governor is committed to ensuring state government is transparent and accountable to the public.” Laurel pointed to a new website that publishes spending data for state agencies and the Legislature as evidence that “Walker and his administration have a proven record of implementing common-sense reforms and policies to promote transparency in state government while also working to streamline state government.”

Late night moves on open records

Wisconsin's open records laws have remained generally untouched since 1981 — well before widespread Internet use, emailing, and text messaging; experts insist an update is in order. But advocates for reform say the latest proposals look more like gutting than revising.

In the wee hours of an early July night, as the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee prepared to pass a budget bill, committee co-chairs John Nygren and Alberta Darling, after a request from Walker and his staff, slipped in language that could have eviscerated the open records law. The wording exempted from public disclosure any documents used during the “deliberative process” by the governor, lawmakers and other state and local government officials. Effectively, it could have been used to shield opinions, analyses, briefings, correspondence about drafts and any notes that lawmakers or their staff created in the process of drafting a bill.

There had been no public input on the proposal, which most people learned of the next morning, only after the committee approved the budget bill.

The move sparked outrage among the public and many political leaders. Within 24 hours, Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel criticized the plan. "Transparency is the cornerstone of democracy and the provisions in the Budget Bill limiting access to public records move Wisconsin in the wrong direction," Schimel said. Even some Republican lawmakers denounced the move. “I will not support a budget that includes this assault on democracy," Republican state Sen. Robert Cowles told reporters the next day.

Republican leaders backed off two days after introducing the change and withdrew the language from the budget bill. But as became clear in September, that was just the beginning of the fight.  In secret, Vos, the assembly speaker, had begun devising a draft bill that would exempt legislators and their staff from the open records law.

While Vos said later he had abandoned the proposal, his statement left the door open for future changes. “It is not our goal to make any changes this session,” he said.

Wisconsin was one of many states to receive a failing grade from the State Integrity Investigation in the category of access to information.

Attack on an ethics watchdog

Ethics enforcement has also been a battleground. Back in 2002, five lawmakers were charged with illegally running political campaigns out of their state offices in what became known as the “caucus scandal.” All five were eventually convicted or pleaded guilty, and the fallout led lawmakers in 2007 to merge a largely ineffective state Ethics Board with the State Elections Board to create the Government Accountability Board.

The six-member board — all retired state judges — was charged with administering and enforcing Wisconsin law on campaign finance, elections, ethics and lobbying. But over the past three years, the board has been dragged into an ongoing, bitter partisan fight between Walker and the state’s Democrats. It started when local prosecutors initiated a secret investigation — using the John Doe system that Walker and the Legislature have since prohibited — into whether the governor and his allies had coordinated with independent political groups in 2012, in violation of campaign finance laws. Conservatives argued that no law had been broken, and the matter ended up before the state Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal later reported that a staff counsel for the accountability board pushed an unsuccessful plan to force some conservative justices to recuse themselves from deciding on the Walker probe. Republicans charged that board staff members had taken sides.

In July, the Supreme Court ruled 4-2 in favor of Walker, finding that no laws were broken, in part because the state's campaign finance laws were "unconstitutionally overbroad and vague," and ordering the investigation to be closed.

Though Walker won out, state Republicans remained livid over allegations of the board's interference. Walker has called for the nonpartisan watchdog agency to be dismantled, and the Legislature is poised to do just that. Both houses have passed bills that would split the board back into two entities comprised of partisan appointments. The Assembly is slated to meet later this month to consider changes made by the Senate.

Campaign finance laws in tumult

As the campaign finance oversight agency has struggled, a series of federal court rulings has also challenged and undermined the laws it is charged with overseeing, forcing the board to back off enforcement of several campaign contribution restrictions. In addition, Walker’s budget bill in 2011 eliminated a state program for public campaign financing.

Since 2010, courts have struck down the state’s limits on how much corporations can spend to support and recruit for their political action committees — which had been capped at either $20,000 or 20 percent of the amount the committee had raised the previous year, whichever was greater — as well as the state’s “aggregate limits” on contributions — a cap on the total amount that an individual could contribute to all candidates and committees, once set at $10,000 per year.

The result has been a series of decisions by the accountability board to effectively cease enforcing many of the state’s limits on campaign contributions.

At a hearing last spring on legislative plans to rework the state’s campaign finance law, Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, an advocacy group, said both sides view the shifting legal environment as an opportunity. His organization wanted “to strengthen our once effective and widely admired campaign finance laws and return Wisconsin elections and state government to the citizens,” while others wanted to “deregulate” campaign financing in the state.

Lawmakers are now tweaking a rewrite of campaign finance law that, among other changes, would allow candidates and independent political groups to coordinate their operations under certain conditions — potentially legalizing the same practices that were the subject of the secret investigation into Walker's campaign. Both houses have approved versions of the changes, and the Assembly is expected to take up the Senate version when it meets later this month.

With Walker back in Wisconsin full time after ending his presidential run, he has refocused on his proposals — and added major changes to Wisconsin’s historic civil service system to his agenda. Partisan battles are a way of life in Madison.

Nothing encapsulates Wyoming more than its logo of a bucking horse and rider, which adorns everything from license plates to the insignia of the state’s only four-year university.

It’s easy to imagine a lone cowboy on his horse galloping across the barren landscape in this state, and that’s still a regular sight here. The Wild West lives on in Wyoming in fields of sagebrush, roaming bison, swaths of vast ranchland, craggy Teton Mountains and even in its bustling oil and gas fields.

Nicknamed the “Cowboy State” for good reason, Wyoming even has cowboy ethics signed into law as the official state code. Former Gov. Dave Freudenthal made the 10 principles of “Cowboy Ethics,” from Jim Owen’s book of the same name, the guideline for Wyoming in 2010. Among these principles: “Do what has to be done”; “Be tough, but fair”; and, “When you make a promise, keep it.”

The passionate individualism and stark independence of the cowboy spirit dominate the state’s politics as well. There are few laws infringing on personal liberties in Wyoming, and the statutes that the state does have can be decidedly vague. Bureaucracy and intrusive government are frowned upon here, privacy prized. As a result, open meetings and public records laws, as well as disclosure requirements for campaigns, elected officials and lobbyists are purposefully weak.

And so Wyoming gets a grade of F and a numerical score of 51 from the State Integrity Investigation, an assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity, ranking it 49th among the states. The result is not much different from where the Cowboy State stood in the 2012 investigation — an F grade, a numerical score of 52 and a No. 48 ranking. The two scores are not directly comparable, however, due to changes made to improve and update the project and methodology, such as eliminating the category for redistricting, a process that generally occurs only once every 10 years.

Small-town state

There’s a saying in the Cowboy State commonly credited to former Gov. Mike Sullivan — “Wyoming is a small town with really long streets.”

It is the least populated state in the union with a mere 580,000 residents, according to the 2014 estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s fewer than six people for each of the state’s nearly 100,000 square miles of ranchland, rolling hills and craggy peaks.

The small-town vibe carries over to politics, said Jim Angell, executive director of the Wyoming Press Association. Lawmakers can’t get away with too much because their constituents hold them accountable, he said.

“They go home and have to face their voters the next day,” he said. That sort of informal oversight is just how it’s done here — and there aren’t many folks arguing for major changes.

In the 125 years of Wyoming statehood, the only government worker ever convicted of a bribery charge was former Insurance Commissioner Gordon W. Taylor in 1990.

“Some may say that’s a lack of prosecution but I say it’s a lack of mean-spiritedness and criminal intent,” Angell said.

Fair enough. But while the people may have good intentions, according to Angell, there’s also a laissez faire attitude toward enforcement of certain laws, which contributes to the state’s poor transparency and accountability, at least according to the numbers.

Executive accountability and ethics

Wyoming’s governor and state cabinet officials have never been prosecuted for alleged crimes, but the former State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Cindy Hill, did come under fire. The Legislature investigated her in 2013 after reports of cronyism in her department, and allegations that she used the state plane for personal purposes and  misused federal grant funds. As a result of other concerns over her job performance,  Gov. Matt Mead signed a law stripping  Hill of her elected duties and removing her from managing the state education department. Hill subsequently sued the state and won when the state supreme court overturned the law,  ruling it was unconstitutional. Hill returned to office in March of 2014, and finished out her elected term in January.

No criminal charges emerged from the legislative probe, but Hill was officially reprimanded by lawmakers for her conduct.

Outcomes aside, the legislative investigation highlighted the fact that the state does not have an independent ethics enforcement agency to handle such allegations.

"We lack any sophisticated statutes to provide for that authority, and as a result, we had some difficulties in this instance," Sen. Chris Rothfuss, told the Casper Star-Tribune in July 2014. "Perhaps that is a lesson learned, but I don’t know that we will take that sort of action.”

Indeed, although lawmakers talked of improving the system, the Legislature has yet to propose any bills that would create an independent ethics agency or commission to deal with complaints against elected officials.

Public information

In addition to widespread accountability weaknesses, Wyoming also has flaws in its open meetings and public records laws. Also called the Equality State, Wyoming came in dead last in the State Integrity Investigation’s access to information category.

“We don’t have the tools that would help people enforce public documents and other sunshine laws,” Angell said. “We have nobody in the state attorney general’s office to hear appeals for documents or public meetings.”

Wyoming statute gives citizens the right to access government information in a general sense, but the law specifically exempts the state legislature and the entire judicial branch. And there seem to be many remaining gray areas in regard to what is or isn’t considered public record.

For example, under the current Public Records Act, University of Wyoming student emails are considered public because they are sent on a state server. Lawmakers considered a proposal earlier this summer to exclude student emails from that law but decided instead to have a committee look into the matter. The group is examining the public records law and will present recommendations to the Legislature’s Digital Information Privacy Task Force this fall. Student email disclosure came up earlier this year when the Laramie Boomerang newspaper requested undergraduates emails from university officials about a proposal to have guns on campus.

Big money

Conversely, Wyoming placed highly for the transparency of its state budgeting process with a score of 93, which ranked the state at No. 3 in that category.

Wyoming, rich in oil and gas resources, has a biennial budget of $9.3 billion that is bolstered by sales tax, property tax and revenue from mineral production. The Cowboy State does not run a deficit, even though there is no personal income or corporate income tax in Wyoming.

The state's Consensus Revenue Estimating Group publishes quarterly reports on revenues collected and money spent in January, April, July and October. In January, for example, the group projected a $222 million deficit for the 2016 fiscal year mainly due to low oil and natural gas prices. The governor also publishes mid-budget reviews to discuss changes in economic assumptions that would affect approved budget policies.

Lawmakers are also heavily involved in the budget process. They generally vote on all departmental budgets, on certain line items and on the executive's overall budget proposal.

“We have quite lengthy discussions about $1,000 or $1,500 items,” Rep. Ruth Ann Petroff, a Republican, said.

That’s the way it might happen in a modest municipality. And that’s the way it does happen in this small town with really long streets.

In 2013, the director of the Idaho Racing Commission told state lawmakers that controversial “instant racing” machines could help save the state’s dying betting industry. He did not tell them he was also registered as a lobbyist in Wyoming on behalf of a company that operates the machines there. That detail didn’t come to light until January, when a reporter at the Idaho Statesman unearthed the potential conflict. The official resigned within days, but apparently broke no laws or rules because he had told his superiors about his employment.

That’s right. A state official worked for a company in an industry he oversaw. Lawmakers apparently didn’t know about the relationship. And technically, there was nothing wrong with that. This situation is not as rare as you might think.

Across the country, state lawmakers and agency officials operate with glaring conflicts of interest and engage in brazenly cozy relationships with lobbyists. Ethics and open records laws are riddled with loopholes, while the watchdogs meant to enforce them face crippling shortages of cash and staff. Those are the findings of the new State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven ranking and assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity.

Alaska received the top grade, earning a C. Only two others — California and Connecticut— earned better than a D+; 11 states received failing grades, with Michigan coming in last. The rankings and grades are based on detailed answers to 245 questions that were researched by experienced reporters in each state. The queries are divided into 13 categories — from public access to information to campaign finance to ethics enforcement — and deal not only with the laws but also how well they’re enforced or implemented.

The results are deeply troubling. In most states, entire branches of government or agencies claim exemptions from open records laws. In two-thirds of all states, ethics oversight entities regularly fail to initiate investigations or impose sanctions. The laws or rules that govern when lawmakers should abstain from voting based on conflicts of interest are often hopelessly vague, and legislators sometimes ignore them anyway.

“Many of these laws are out of date, they need to be revised,” said Robert Stern, who was president of the Center for Governmental Studies, which worked with state and local governments on ethics and disclosure laws until it closed in 2011. Stern is now helping draft a ballot measure in California to update the state’s campaign finance and ethics laws. “It’s very, very difficult for legislatures to focus on these things and improve them because they don’t want these laws, they don’t want to enforce them and they don’t want to fund people enforcing them.”

It may be tempting to write off corruption in state government as small-time, little more than fodder for racy headlines and tasteless jokes. But in fact, state legislatures pass thousands of bills a year and collect and disburse more than $1 trillion. Indeed, gridlock and partisanship in Washington D.C. have pushed a majority of Americans to turn to state and local government for solutions to the country’s problems, according to a recent poll. Given the findings of the State Integrity Investigation, that’s a worrisome prospect.

At the same time, newspaper coverage of statehouses is shrinking, with full-time statehouse staff suffering a 35 percent drop between 2003 and 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. Newswires, nonprofit news organizations and other unconventional outlets are trying to fill the gap, but they haven’t made up for the loss of newspaper reporters in the halls of state capitols. With fewer prying eyes snooping into their business, perhaps it’s no surprise that state officials regularly engage in such dubious behavior.

In 36 states, the State Integrity Investigation found, lawmakers at least occasionally vote on bills that may present a conflict of interest. Take the lawmaker in Missouri who introduced a bill this year to prohibit cities from banning plastic bags in grocery stores. It just so happens he’s also state director of the Missouri Grocers Association. Or his peers in real estate and ranching who sponsored bills to help landlords and cattlemen. And those are just the ones we know about.

“We would love to be able to do more comprehensive audits,” said Carol Williams, executive director of Kansas’ Governmental Ethics Commission. Williams told the investigation’s Kansas reporter that her staff is unable to audit the financial disclosure forms submitted to her office. Instead, all they can do is make sure officials are filling them out. “Whether they are correct or not, we don't know,” she said.

She’s not alone. Only two states initiate comprehensive, independent audits of lawmakers’ financial disclosures on an annual basis. In 3-in-5 states, the project found, inadequate funding causes ethics oversight staff to be overloaded with work and, occasionally, forces them to delay their investigations.

Delaware's Public Integrity Commission, which oversees lobbying and ethics laws for the executive branch there, has just two full-time employees. A 2013 report by a special state prosecutor found that the agency was unable “to undertake any serious inquiry or investigation into potential wrongdoing.”

Where states scored the worst, however, was in handling public access to information. Only six states escaped a failing grade in that category. Open records laws have been bogged down with lengthy lists of exemptions. Executive agencies regularly charge exorbitant fees — thousands or even millions of dollars in the case of the Massachusetts State Police. Citizens whose requests are rejected often have no recourse other than legal action, a lengthy and expensive prospect. The general attitude was summed up best in 2013 by one New Mexico representative, who defended a rule the Legislature passed that declared lawmakers’ emails exempt from open records laws. “I think it’s up to me to decide if you can have my record,” he said.

Since the beginning of 2012, at least 12 states have seen their legislative leaders or top cabinet-level officials charged, convicted or resign as a result of ethics or corruption-related scandals. Five house or assembly leaders have fallen. No state has outdone New York, where 14 lawmakers have left office since the beginning of 2012 due to ethical or criminal issues, according to a count by Citizen’s Union, an advocacy group. That does not include the former leaders of both the Assembly and the Senate, who were charged in unrelated corruption schemes earlier this year but remain in office without their leadership roles. Together, they comprised two of the “three men in a room” who, along with the governor, essentially decide how to spend the Empire State’s $140 billion annual budget.

Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously wrote that states are the laboratories of democracy, and that sunlight is the best disinfectant. If this sorry litany of corruption cases is what happens when the labs have no windows, what are we left to think about their experiments?