North Carolina Government Gets Bad Grades On Integrity

A new report is giving North Carolina low marks for state integrity.

Overall, the state's government got a “D” grade in the latest report from the Center for Public Integrity.

But that's still good enough to rank it among the top 20 in the nation. In fact, only three states scored higher than a “D+” in the investigation: Alaska, California and Connecticut.

Among the biggest knocks against North Carolina: poor judicial accountability, state pension fund management, and ease of ability to access public information. The state received “F” grades in each category.

But the Tar Heel State wasn't alone on that last point. Overall, 44 states received the lowest letter grade for information access.

State Integrity Project manager Nicholas Kusnetz says in many places, the public access laws aren't robust, there are exemptions that keep potentially important information veiled, and there's little recourse if a public information request is denied.

“Another thing that you see is a lot of agencies are either denying requests outright without adequate explanation, or taking a long time to reply,” Kusnetz says, “which, as one source told our reporter, is sometimes as bad as a denial.”

Still, it wasn't all bad news for North Carolina, comparatively speaking.

The state ranked highly for the transparency of its budget process, political financing, and legislative and executive branch accountability.