County may lobby to close some financial records to the public

Sedgwick County may push for more financial records to be closed to the public after its finance department lost more than half a million dollars to fraud.

Assistant County Counselor Jon Von Achen said Monday that he is reviewing the Kansas Open Records Act and its 55 exemptions, which local governments can use to not release certain information to the public and media.

Von Achen, who handles the county’s efforts to track state legislation in Topeka, suggested an additional exemption to the law “to protect financial data that is of a secure nature.”

“There is nothing that I can do to protect certain financial records from being produced,” Von Achen told county commissioners. “I can protect the architectural plans for this building (the courthouse) under a KORA exemption, but I cannot protect the internal workings of finance from the same.

“We are more likely to get attacked through the finance department, as we’ve found out, than we are if somebody tried to blow up this building,” he said.

Sedgwick County lost $566,088.90 to fraud last fall. Documents obtained by The Eagle through records requests showed that amount matched an electronic payment for a road project that never reached Wichita construction company Cornejo & Sons. Someone used a fraudulent e-mail to pose as a vendor to change payment information.

It was not immediately clear whether the records the county wants to exempt from KORA were related to the fraud or were requested by media after the fraud was committed. County public information officer Kate Flavin said no wording had been finalized for a potential exemption.

“Commissioners need to agree to move forward on the topic before anything is drafted,” Flavin wrote in an e-mail.

Some information sought by The Eagle and other news outlets has been withheld by the county, which cited an exemption in the law for records related to an ongoing criminal investigation.

State law contains other exemptions that prevent records such as personnel files and draft documents from being released. Public entities are allowed, but not required, to cite exemptions in the open records act when denying the release of information.

Von Achen said plenty of financial records would remain open to the public even if an exemption is added to the law.

“But part of the lesson that we’ve learned and part of the lesson that we’ve learned from others is that while we want to be as open as possible, we also need to make sure that we are secure and that we are protecting the taxpayers’ dollars,” he said.

Other victims of fraud, such as the Community College System of New Hampshire, have said the public contracting process makes some vendor information more available and could make government agencies more vulnerable to phishing attempts.

County Commission Chairman Jim Howell, who was open to a new exemption, said responding to records requests about internal financial procedures could allow “their (scammers’) foot in the door to create trouble.”

“We’ve been extremely transparent and open and I would say almost to a fault,” Howell said. “If an effort to be transparent and open leads to vulnerability, that crosses a line.”

This story was originally published January 9, 2017 at 5:51 PM with the headline "County may lobby to close some financial records to the public."