Reports and Fact Sheets

March 2019 Estimating the Costs of a Public Financing System in NYS The cost of a public financing system in NYS is $60 million annually Read more November 2018 FOIL that Works: MTA 2018 An in-depth look at FOIL at the MTA shows a fragmented process and offers best practices for online FOIL and police incident reports (2018) Read more May 2018 Costs to Public for Business Subsidy Deals Varies Wildly Analysis of Governor Cuomo's economic development deals show the cost per job varies greatly from project to project Read more December 2017 NYS Courts Deny FOILers Attorneys’ Fees in Nearly 1 in 4 Lawsuits Even When Records Provided and Agencies Had No Reason to Withhold Read more October 2017 NYS Lobbying Transparency Undermined by Antiquated Technology & Irregular Reporting Lobbying transparency in NYS could be improved by modernizing JCOPE's database Read more March 2017 Open New York “Tools” Recommendations for specific tools that enable state agencies to quickly create web-based information resources to be included in OpenNY.gov (2011) Read more March 2017 State Email Retention Policy New York State should match the Federal Government's email retention policy and save emails for 7 years and the emails of executive staff permanently (2014) Read more March 2017 Listening to FOIL 2: NYC DOITT FOIL Requests 2015 An examination of the FOIL logs of one New York City agency (DoITT) tells us what data sets are high-value and should be open data (2015) Read more January 2016 Modest Burden, Modest Value: Extending FOIL to NYS Legislature January 2016 January 13, 2016 analysis recommending NYS legislature subject itself completely to Freedom of Information Law as do 23 other state legislatures. Report notes NYC Council already subjected to FOIL and in 2014 got only approximately 70 FOIL requests compared to more than 50,000 received by mayoral agencies. Includes chart of 23 state legislatures and commonly FOILed topics. Read more November 2015 State Integrity Investigation 2015 Corruption Risk Survey In 2015, NY State received a D- grade from the State Integrity Investigation based on the questions in this spreadsheet. https://publicintegrity.org/accountability/new-york-gets-d-grade-in-2015-state-integrity-investigation/ Read more February 2015 Serving Two Masters The New York State legislature should start fighting corruption by capping outside income, as Congress did decades ago (2015) Read more July 2014 Listening to FOIL An examination of the FOIL logs of one state agency tells us what data sets are high-value and should be open data. Read more