By Zachary Gorchow
Executive Editor and Publisher
Posted: March 21, 2017 1:13 PM

Transparency in government is suddenly all the rage in Michigan among a number of top officials.

It seems every major player other than Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof (R-West Olive) backs extending the Freedom of Information Act to the governor’s office and applying a similar law to the Legislature, opening up records to those two entities to the public for the first time, although Governor Rick Snyder has yet to publicly sign onto the idea.

Democrats are backing financial disclosure for Michigan elected officials. That has yet to catch on with Republicans, but it’s not been something about which even the minority caucus, whether Democrat or Republican, has shown much excitement in the past. Lt. Governor Brian Calley is reviewing how Michigan can improve its transparency laws.

But beyond the familiar terrain of the FOIA and the Open Meetings Act, there’s a relatively new issue that has surfaced on the transparency front.

The Michigan Department of Treasury no longer is making public how much it spends to pay each judgment in lawsuits it loses or for each settlement in other cases. This is a huge change. As recently as two years ago, the department provided the itemized information to the Senate Fiscal Agency, which annually publishes a report on how much the state paid out in lawsuit settlements and judgments in each of those cases and for all departments.

Now all the department is providing to the Senate Fiscal Agency, or any other member of the public, is the overall amount for the fiscal year paid out with no information about how much it paid in any of those specific cases.

One could track down judgments by looking up each individual case through the courts. Those are a matter of public record, but involve a multitude of courts and would not include settlements, which usually are not a part of the court record and generally are far more frequent than judgments.

Treasury might be the most frequently sued of all the state agencies as a result of lawsuits challenging its taxing decisions. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, the department paid out $65,841,278 in judgments and settlements.

Gongwer News Service published a recent story on why Treasury changed its approach. That’s available for subscribers. In short, Treasury officials said the Department of Attorney General instructed them that changes to law in 2014 and 2015 meant the department could not release the specific case data.

The two laws in question are PA 240 of 2014 and PA 10 of 2015. In neither case did it seem the major purpose of the law was to wall off from the public how much the state is paying out in settlements and judgments in tax cases, but the changes to the law, under the Department of Attorney General’s interpretation, did just that.

Transparency laws provide an accountability mechanism. Legislators will have to ask whether they and the public can adequately evaluate the actions of the Department of Treasury without knowing whether they lost a judgment or settled a case and how much that cost taxpayers.