Missouri auditor documents open government issues

From the office of Susan Montee, Missouri State Auditor, comes a new audit summarizing "a variety of audit issues and recommendations regarding the Sunshine Law, Chapter 610, RSMo, and other issues related to meeting minutes, was compiled using audit reports issued between January 2008 and December 2009. These issues were addressed in 59 audit reports."

The issue of closed meetings, proper documentation for closed meetings, posting of meeting agendas, and public access to records are addressed in this report, as are recommendations regarding the Sunshine Law.

For more, visit the Introduction and then the complete audit report (PDF).

CPI Unveils News Report on Toxins

A wonderful new FOI-driven series....by one of my favorite grad students.

When two-and-a-half-year-old Amber Nickol McKeown got head lice, her mother put the child in a warm bath and massaged Osco Lice Treatment Shampoo into her scalp. Problem solved.

But the little girl’s condition deteriorated quickly. Her chest turned red. She labored to breathe. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and her skin peeled off in clumps. Seventy-two hours later, Amber was dead - an autopsy showed her death had been triggered by exposure to a type of pesticide called a pyrethrin and its accompanying impurities, according to the family’s lawsuit.

While Amber’s story is an extreme case, it clearly shows the hidden hazards of household pesticides and the need to revisit their safety. The Center for Public Integrity’s new report, Perils of the New Pesticides, reveals that these so-called “safe” pesticides, used in thousands of consumer products, accounted for more than 26 percent of all fatal, “major,” and “moderate” human incidents in the United States in 2007, a 300% increase over the last decade.

This Center for Public Integrity project provides the public with a searchable database of products containing these pesticides so consumers can check for incident reports on harmful pesticides used in their own homes. The Center’s reporting also pushed the EPA to fast track its study of the pesticides’ effects, something the EPA was not planning to do for years until the Center showed officials what was happening.

More here.

Think You've Waited a While for your FOI Request?

As the Reporters Committee explains, TRAC waited THIRTY YEARS....

A federal judge ruled Friday that the Internal Revenue Service has flouted three court orders dating back to 1976, requiring it to regularly provide requested information to a Syracuse

University professor. Judge Marsha Pechman, of the Western District of Washington in Seattle, ordered the IRS to produce unredacted copies of the requested audit reports within 30 days.

In addition, the IRS must comply with future requests and send the documents electronically to Syracuse School of Management Professor Susan B. Long within 30 days of her inquiries.

Long co-directs Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data-research organization through the school that compiles government statistics for the public. She filed a motion in February for compliance with the three previous orders.

The FOIA saga that spanned four decades began in 1974 when Long, then a graduate student at The University of Washington, filed her original request for statistics from the IRS. She received a court order to enforce the request two years later.