West Virginia got an unfair grade on a national survey of transparency in government spending websites in the 50 states, state auditor Glen Gainer said Thursday. A report released this week by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group gave the state’s transparencywv.org website a grade of C for transparency, giving the site high marks for easy-to-access information on state contracts and spending, but deducting points for a lack of data on economic development subsidies.
The state received only 8 of a possible 27 points for transparency in economic development subsidies, including tax credits, grants and other incentives to attract business investment and had another 4 possible points deducted for failing to disclose expenditures that, by law, cannot be posted on the website.
However, Gainer said much of the economic development data the U.S. PIRG report said is missing from the state website was added to the site earlier this year. “We tried to tell them, ‘here it is,’ but we didn’t get any credit for it,” Gainer said Thursday. “There’s some fallacies in the way they came up with the score for us,” he added. Continue>>>
======