Facts with receipts: How The Current finds documents and how you can, too

When government acts as a private club, that creates an opening for mistakes, wasted money, cronyism and worse. So, nearly every working day, someone from The Current GA’s team makes a request for a paper trail that will illuminate state and local government discussions and decisions.

The work to publish facts with receipts is possible due to the powerful few pages of “sunshine” law that guarantee Georgians the right to inspect their governments’ work.

We ask for invoices paid by taxpayer funds, personnel files, elected officials’ work calendars, police reports, meeting minutes, e-mails and more.  

“Public access to public records should be encouraged to foster confidence in government and so that the public can evaluate the expenditure of public funds and the efficient and proper functioning of its institutions,” says Georgia law.

In that spirit of fostering confidence, here’s a look at how our team used Georgia Open Records Law to empower our readers with facts to become more civically engaged.  

Many of The Current’s stories rely on public documents, like environment reporter Mary Landers’ reporting revealing that McIntosh County spent nearly a half-million dollars (and counting) to defend its attempt to rezone Sapelo Island’s Hogg Hummock community. Data reporter Maggie Lee’s story co-reported with Ross Williams of Georgia Recorder analyzed state data that showed Christian schools around the state as well as Amazon are the largest recipients so far of Georgia school voucher dollars.

Sometimes, documents provide background research, rather than yield an immediate story. Regardless, we file the records we receive from our records request on a public, free, searchable archive that now contains more than 5,000 documents including records that local governments proactively publish, as well as those that our newsroom has requested.

Verifying reports

“I use open records laws to flesh out leads, to confirm or dispel allegations, and to look for newsworthy information,” says Robin Kemp, The Current’s Liberty County reporter. 

Those kinds of records requests have helped Kemp illustrate the financial struggles of the small Liberty County municipality of Walthourville, and stop disinformation. 

If she couldn’t get documents like leases straight from local governments, she’d be reliant on comments from humans. But when dealing with powerful people, sometimes those comments may be self-serving, lack context or simply be wrong.

Public-spirited whistleblowers exist, but so do powerful people who want to smear their rivals or detractors with half-truths.  Facebook battles over important public questions are liable to generate more heat than light. But documents can help us figure out what’s factual when those community forums turn up a potential story.  

Glynn County reporter Jabari Gibbs uses Georgia’s open records law for every investigative story that involves the government. That’s how he was able to count the public price tag for Brunswick District Attorney Keith Higgins’ financial and legal dispute with the five southeast Georgia counties that bankroll the prosecutor’s office. 

“Higgins filed a suit against the counties … but we didn’t have the counties’ response to that, so I used open records law to get that information,” Gibbs said.  “And even the amount of money the counties spent on the audit of Higgins’ office, I had to use the open records law to get that information.”

Asking and asking again

Following the money usually can’t happen without invoices or contracts. So when The Current decided to examine the promises versus the reality of one of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s marquee policies — mandating work requirements for able-bodied Georgians to receive Medicaid — documents were vital. 

Editor-in-Chief Margaret Coker spent months diligently digging for the state contracts which were the basis for her investigative series on this Medicaid work requirement experiment known as Georgia Pathways to Coverage. What she found was proof that the numbers of Georgians who were enrolled in the program fell far short of those that Kemp’s office had estimated to receive federal funding. That’s not the sort of thing that Georgia’s most powerful elected official would want to publicize. 

Coker sifted through thousands of pages of documents that outlined how Deloitte Consulting LLC earned more than $89 million to manage the policy rollout, build the technological platform that Georgians needed to interact with to apply for and receive subsidized federal health insurance and market the program to the estimated quarter of a million Georgians eligible. She discovered that the state never linked Deloitte’s payments to enrollment goals, so the consultants continued earning their fees, even when taxpayers complained that the digital portal was glitchy and prevented them from receiving the insurance coverage they needed.

The revelations came despite a huge hurdle: Hundreds of pages of those contracts had been blacked out and redacted due to Georgia’s law that allows for companies to remove information that they consider “trade secrets” to remain outside of the public domain. The Department of Community Health, the state agency that contracted with Deloitte, is not part of the process to determine what is a “trade secret” or not.

As of this fall, only 3 percent of eligible Georgians were enrolled in the program.

Despite this, Georgia’s policy experiment was cited as a model  during U.S. Congressional budget discussions over the summer that ended with lawmakers nationalizing Medicaid work requirements. 

Smaller asks 

Most of The Current’s records requests this year were less fraught than an eight-figure contract with national implications.

But that doesn’t make run-of-the-mill requests straightforward. 

Under state law, state agencies, or local governments should reply within three days to confirm receipt of the request and explain how they will respond. 

Complex requests for e-mails, permits, videos or other documents that sit in giant databases might take time to produce responsive records. Staff at the agency might ask for more details on what to search. If the search will take more than 15 minutes, agencies can and do charge for the time it takes to compile an answer. Agencies also must redact private information such as Social Security numbers from documents — chargeable time, too.

Sometimes, there’s simply no record to provide — like budget contingency plans when no such plan was actually made.

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for officials to defy state law and simply not acknowledge or respond to the request. 

In those cases, we keep asking.

The Current’s reporters logged our requests from Sept. 1 until Dec. 15 this year, to give ourselves and our readers an idea of our requests and our success rate. 

We made 55 requests. The sticky cases gall us, take an inordinate amount of time, and send us to consult each other and lawyers. But those cases are a minority.

Most of our requests are simple and don’t cost anything. The most common response we get is “Here you go.”