Here’s a quick summary. In a 50 state overview, there were no “A” students.
The State Integrity Investigation is a $1.5 million public collaborative project designed to expose practices that undermine trust in state capitols — and spotlight the states that are doing things right. It describes itself as “an unprecedented, data-driven analysis of each state’s laws and practices that deter corruption and promote accountability and openness. Experienced journalists graded each state government on its corruption risk using 330 specific measures. The Investigation ranked every state from one to 50. Each state received a report card with letter grades in 14 categories, including campaign finance, ethics laws, lobbying regulations, and management of state pension funds.”
Click on the U.S. map to see your state’s corruption risk report card. No states scored an “A.” New Jersey, Connecticut, Washington, California, and Nebraska scored in the “B” range. Eight states flunked, scoring 60% or less: Michigan, North Dakota, South Carolina, Maine, Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Georgia. All the remaining states were “C” and “D” students, with our home state of Massachusetts scoring a lackluster 74%, coming in at 10th “best” overall.
How did the insurance departments score?
As citizens, both corporate and private, we find the whole report fairly intriguing, but for the purposes of this blog, we were particularly interested in the ratings for State Insurance Commissions. PropertyCasualty360’s Mark Ruquet did a good analysis of this in his article 16 State Insurance Commissions Fail Integrity Evaluation.
The state Insurance Commissions were evaluated on these questions:

• Is the state insurance commission protected from political and special interest influence?
• Does the state insurance commission have sufficient capacity to carry out its mandate?
• Are there conflicts of interest regulations covering members of the board and senior staff of the state insurance commission?
• Are the conflicts of interest regulations covering members of the board and senior staff of the state insurance commission effective?
• Can citizens access the asset disclosure records of the state insurance commission?
• Does the state insurance commission publicly disclose documents filed by insurance companies?

One of the things we like about the map and the site is that you can keep drilling down. Click your state, then click a specific category – such as “State Insurance Commissions,” “Ethics Enforcement Agencies” or “Public Access to Information” and then click again to see the specific areas that were evaluated. Click any one of those criteria to see how the score was derived, and click again for further detail. You can also read or submit comments. On each individual state page, there is also a narrative story behind the score and a running list of related news articles.
We’ll be spending some time exploring the site further, but our first reaction is positive and we applaud the effort: we love sunlight when it comes to the public good and think it benefits everyone. We’d love to hear reactions about how accurate or inaccurate readers think reports are relative to their own state scores.