Connecticut’s government generates a lot of data. The state has over 80 departments, agencies, commissions, offices, and other governmental organizations charged with carrying out a variety of duties and responsibilities, many relating to public services. And that doesn’t touch on other government entities, like the state’s constitutional offices, or the legislature.

Keeping track of what these agencies do is no easy feat. And while the state’s government does have multiple platforms that make data generated by the government publicly accessible, such as the Open Data Portal, the amount of data available can be overwhelming. In many cases, you have to know what you’re looking for to find it. In other cases, the data available may not be presented in a format useful for analysis.

But, above all, many of the state’s data tools and reports simply don’t paint a broad picture of what state agencies do. Instead, they provide data on specific programs, initiatives, or other aspects of an agency’s operations. They rarely provide context, except in reference to earlier data from the same set.

That’s where agency-generated reports come in. Many of Connecticut’s state agencies are statutorily required to generate and submit reports to the legislature and the governor. Most commonly, state statute requires that state agencies submit an annual report to the legislative committee with oversight of their subject matter jurisdiction. For example, the Commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) is required to submit an annual report no later than February of each year to the governor, the Auditors of Public Accounts, and the General Assembly’s joint standing committees with “cognizance of matters relating to appropriations and the budgets of state agencies, finance, revenue and bonding and commerce.” The same statute also requires DECD to post that report to their website no later than 30 days after it has been submitted.

UPDATE 4.2.24: After publication, state auditors reached out to Inside Investigator and noted that they look at mandated state agency reports when they perform audits. They provided a list of all mandated reports as of December 2019, which they created at the request of the Appropriations Committee. You can download that Excel file by clicking here.

Elsewhere, state statute requires agencies to submit more narrow reports on specific programs or initiatives. For example, the Department of Corrections (DOC) is required to annually submit reports on several facilities under its jurisdiction to the State Advisory Council on Children and Families.

Not all agencies that are required to submit annual reports must post them on their website. For example, the commissioner of the Department of Banking (DOB) must submit several annual reports to the governor and the legislative committee with oversight of banking, but nowhere in statute is it required to post those reports on its website within a certain time frame.

But in a number of cases, government agencies that have previously posted regular reports on their websites have ceased to do so.

What’s in a report?

State agency reports contain a variety of information. Many include top-line figures on how much money different departments within a given agency have used in the past year. In the case of agencies that work with the federal government to administer programs, annual reports also provide more information about how resources involved in those programs have been used.

They can also provide information about where in state statute agencies draw the authority to perform various functions. Annual reports from constitutional officers also contain useful facts. For example, the office of the attorney general’s annual report includes figures about the number of investigations and inquiries of various types the office has begun and completed in a given year. Annual reports can also contain useful information about how agencies are structured.

Many give an overview of what various programs and departments have accomplished in the past year, or how they have operated. For example, the Department of Children and Families’ (DCF) annual report contains statistics about “key results” the agency has sought to put in place. These include statistics that give insight into how the department’s operations have changed over time: as of July 1, 2023, 40.1 percent of children in DCF placement were placed in the care of kin as opposed to 21 percent on January 1, 2011.

This is just an overview of the types of information available through annual reports. There are also other types of annual reporting, mandated by state statute, that require state agencies to track and report on the various programs they administer.

In short, regular reporting is a good source of information, in some cases information that may not be available elsewhere, for anyone interested in government oversight or tracking how state agencies perform.

But just because government is required to produce this information doesn’t mean it’s easily available to the public, if it’s available at all.

Where to find reports, and what’s missing?

There are a number of ways state agency reports can be located. But for members of the public seeking information on the function of state agencies, perhaps the most obvious place to start a search is a state agency website.

For the most part, state agency websites make it relatively easy to locate publications, including required reporting. Most state agency websites have a “publication” tab on their home page and access to annual reporting and other reports the agency produces, some because of statutory requirements, are one to two clicks away. Roughly 75.5 percent of agencies that produce an annual report (excluding state universities, the Connecticut State Library, and the Finance Advisory Committee) contain links to agency-authored publications, including annual reports and other statutorily required reports, on their homepages.

But only a small portion of state agencies host up-to-date reporting on those pages, if at all.

The Digest of Administrative Reports to the Governor, published annually, contains statutorily required annual reports from 57 state entities. Just 42 percent of agencies (again excluding state universities, the Connecticut State Library, and the Finance Advisory Committee) that produce annual reports included in the digest link to them on their websites. And of those, only 34 percent have updated their websites with annual reports from 2022 or later.

The same is true for other regularly reproduced reports produced by state agencies: reports from recent years have not been regularly updated. And, in some cases, other types of reports are regularly updated on state agency websites while annual reports are not.

Inside Investigator reached out to several state agencies to try to understand whether publications that had previously been posted on their websites were still produced and submitted, focusing particularly on reports that are required by state statute.

The Department of Agriculture (DOA) was the only agency that responded to questions about out-of-date reports on their website. State statute requires the DOA to maintain an animal population control program to reduce the state’s overpopulation of dogs and cats by providing sterilization and vaccines to pets owned by low-income residents, to animals adopted from municipal pounds, and to non-profit organizations focused on reducing the number of feral cats in the state. State statute not only tasks the agency with running this program, but also with providing an annual report to the legislature’s Environment Committee on the program’s operations and finances.

The DOA is also responsible for developing and administering a program that markets farm products grown and produced in Connecticut and must report annually on the program to the Environment Committee.

Prior to Inside Investigator’s inquiry into the state of more recent reports, the most recent Connecticut Grown and Animal Control Population Program (APCP) reports available were from 2021. DOA was able to provide the APCP report from 2022. The 2023 Connecticut Grown report was still being drafted at the time of our initial inquiry, but was later provided. Both updated reports are now available on the agency’s website. The DOA does not publish its annual report on its website.

Inside Investigator also reached out to DCF and DOC with questions about outdated publications on their respective websites but did not receive a response.

UPDATE 4.2.24: DCF emailed Inside Investigator after publication to clarify how they handle several reports, listed below:

• Screening for Development Delays (per C.G.S. 17a-106e): “This section is ‘within available appropriations’ and [the] report is part of the annual report card that is the responsibility of the Committee on Children who no longer maintains the report card.”
• Facility Reports (per C.G.S. 17a-32a): “These reports are not submitted to the legislature. They are submitted to the State Advisory Council on Children and Families.”
• Family Assessment Response Program Annual Data Report (per C.G.S. 17a-101g): “This report is also meant for the children report card which is no longer operational.”

DOC last updated its annual report on its website in 2015. The report is currently available on its website between 2003 and 2015, as are a number of other reports and publications, some of which are statutorily required.

Inside Investigator reached out to inquire about the status of the department’s annual report, as well as the Criminal Justice Risk Assessment Strategy Report, which it last posted in 2010, but received no response. The department’s Criminal Justice Risk Assessment Strategy Report is a statutorily required report, to be submitted to the Judiciary Committee annually, that went into effect following a 2008 law. It requires the department to report on the development, implementation and effectiveness of its risk assessment strategy for offenders in DOC custody. Reports from 2008 and 2009 are available on the agency’s website, but more recent ones are not.

Likewise, DCF is required to annually produce a number of reports that it has previously posted to its website. These include an annual report on screening for developmental delays in young children who are victims of abuse or neglect, (last posted online in 2016), reports on facilities under DCF jurisdiction (last posted online in 2016), and a report on the department’s family assessment response program (last posted in 2018). The department did not provide a response to Inside Investigator’s questions about whether the reports are still produced and submitted.

All in all, reports are out of date for all but 16 departments.

Hard to find

That required reporting is not consistently posted on state agency websites does not necessarily mean it is unavailable to the public. If you know what you’re looking for, missing publications and out of date reports on state websites should still be accessible. Many agency publications, both physical and digital, are also statutorily required to be sent to the Connecticut State Library (CSL) as part of a depository program that preserves state publications.

Per C.G.S. 11-9c, the state library is responsible for creating and providing public access “on a permanent basis, to a collection of tangible state publications, and to a digital archive of intangible state publications, and a depository library system.”

Publications sent to the library include any produced “at the total or partial expense, or under authority of the agency, or under the authority of a group of organizations including the agency” or that are legislatively, judicially, or administratively mandated. Examples of the types of publications the CSL maintains include:

State statute also dictates the timeline by which agencies are supposed to send reports and other documents to the CSL. Again per C.G.S. 11-9c, the library is to receive publications “on or about publication date” copies of each physical publication and either copies of or notice of the existence of digital publications. State agencies are responsible for notifying the library of the existence of publications. The library can dictate the number of copies agencies must provide to it. Currently, the CSL requests 14 copies of print publications and two paper copies plus a digital copy of electronic publications.

The library is also tasked with annually publishing an “official list of state publications.” In this context, state publications refer not only to reports generated by public agencies and other forms of government organizations but also covers publications that are produced with state funds, even if only partially so.

This means any regular reporting missing from a state agency’s website should be available through the CSL’s state publications database.

But locating them on the CSL’s website is not easy. In some cases, more up to date publications can be found through the state’s Content DM site but not by searching through Primo, its primary catalog.

But the library’s Content DM site is not necessarily where it directs the public.

 “Official publications of the agencies of the State of Connecticut.” the library webpage for state documents published in the Connecticut Digital Archive reads. “Many of the documents are born-digital and are not readily available through any other portal. We recommend consulting our online catalog when searching this collection.” The text links to Primo’s search portal.

While searching for certain documents through Primo links to the library’s Content DM site, it doesn’t always do so. A search for the annual report produced by the Department of Banking in Primo links to the Connecticut State Government Publications Content DM website, where the report is available through 2020. Annual reporting through 2021 from the Office of the Child Advocate can also be located this way.

In other cases, both sites are missing regular agency reporting.

A search for the annual report produced by the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) in Primo does not link to the library’s Content DM site. It locates physical copies of the report (from the year 2000), but not digital records. Searching for DAS’ annual report on the Content DM site also returns nothing. A search for annual reporting from the Department of Corrections returned the same results.

In other cases, regular reporting for state agencies cannot be found on either site. Some annual reports from the Department of Consumer Protection are available through Primo. The most recent is from 2010. But a search for annual reporting from the department only returns one result on the Content DM site- a report to the legislature from 2014.

Nor does the unavailability of materials seem to be something the library is unaware of. The library’s how-to page on using Primo notes that “Some of the CT State Archives materials may be cataloged in Primo, but only some.”

At the time of writing, an employee with the library’s Government Information Unit noted that the Connecticut Digital Archives, which house the State Archives, were undergoing a migration based out of the University of Connecticut and that, as a result, searchability of documents might be affected.

Asked about whether the library is aware of any agencies that may not be up to date in providing publications to the library, the employee stated that they do not maintain a list of items each is statutorily required to provide them due to the extensive number of publications. They noted that it may be possible that state agencies maintain their own individual list of publications, but none have been provided to the library.

The CSL also maintains profiles of state agencies. These include links to the agency’s website, information about where in Connecticut statute they draw authority from, an overview of the agency’s history, and information about current and past commissioners. In addition, the profiles contain links to agency publications available through the library and a link to the Digest of Administrative Reports to the governor. The digest, which is published annually by DAS, collects the annual report each agency is statutorily required to submit to it every year.

These direct links to agency publications—and to a convenient digest of information on the latest information available on state agencies—should make this a convenient resource for anyone looking for agency reporting. The digest is available digitally from 2001 forward. Prior to that, it was published physically and versions of those reports are available at depository libraries.

But, as with other publications, the digest is not up-to-date. The link to the digest hosted in the library’s agency profiles only links to versions of the document published between 2007 and 2016, available on the Content DM site.

The most recent edition of the digest—and many of state agency’s annual reports—can be found on the Department of Administrative Services. And that’s currently the only place anyone searching for that information is guaranteed to find it.

As for up-to-date versions of other statutorily required reports, finding these is something of a luck of the draw. In some cases, they may be available on state agency websites. But whether or not the most recent version of that report is available is also uncertain. In many of the cases where state agencies have stopped updating their annual reports on their website, they have also stopped regularly posting other regular reporting.

Nor is there any guarantee that they’re available through the CSL.

This means contacting an agency directly to locate up-to-date information is probably the most reliable way to locate required reporting. But even that’s no guarantee, as DOC’s and DCF’s failure to return Inside Investigator’s questions demonstrates. Doing so also often requires knowing what you’re looking for—the name of a report and the year it was published.

Understanding exactly how many current state publications are inaccessible to the public is difficult because there is no comprehensive list of all reports public agencies generate, whether they are required by state statute or are produced for a different reason.

One more state resource that contains information on statutorily required reports is the Office of Legislative Research’s (OLR) Legislative Library. OLR, which provides nonpartisan research to legislators and their staff, maintains a library of current and historical statutes, laws, House of Representative and Senate journals, research reports, and other types of documents related to the legislative process.

Its collection also includes legislative mandated reports. The library can be searched by looking at the subject area for each legislative committee, which includes link to resources, such as recent OLR reports in that subject matter area, relevant databases, and statutorily required reports. As the library notes, though, the list of reports available through there is not exhaustive.

Obtaining the reports requires contacting the library. Inside Investigator reached out to the Legislative Library and requested the most recent version of the Commission on Women, Children, Senior, Equity and Opportunity’s annual report. The commission is tasked with focusing on quality-of-life results, including healthy, safe, and achievable education access; freedom from poverty; and freedom from discrimination for women, children, and their families; seniors; and members of the state’s African-American, Asian Pacifica American, Latino, and Puerto Rican populations. It is statutorily required to submit an annual report on these results to the appropriations committee by no later than January 1.

The legislative library was able to provide the most recent copy of the report they received from the commission, which was from 2019. The library also noted that always include a caveat that just because they do not have more recent versions of reports does not mean they were not completed. The most recent version of the report available on the commission’s website is also from 2019. The commission did not respond to a question about whether more up-to-date versions of the report are available.

So, while the Legislative Library is another resource potentially available to the public, it is also not guaranteed to have the most up-to-date information available.

Diminishing Oversight

State statute requires availability of agency reporting not only because the activities of public agencies need to be accessible to the public that funds them, but also because they are a low-stakes option for obtaining public information.

Annual state agency reporting contains useful information, such as the budgetary resources various divisions within agencies have used in the previous year, information on what an agency has undertaken or achieved in the previous year, and other details that might not otherwise be available through regular channels of communication with the public, such as press releases.

The information in them can be an alternative to or a stepping stone for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Filing a FOIA takes time and, often, resources. Depending on the information a person is looking for, they come with costs associated with the production of information. Those costs may make obtaining information beyond the realm of possibility for some residents. State agency reports can also be a stepping-stone to FOIA, giving someone interested in learning more information about an agency a starting point to file a request, and helping them narrow down search terms. This can facilitate information getting to them faster and at a lower cost.

When agency reports aren’t available to the public, the loss is twofold: not only is the public unavailable to perform basic oversight of their government by obtaining them and learning more about how they’ve been served by public programs, but they’re unable to use public reports as stepping stones to dive deeper into government functions and utilize other tools to perform greater oversight.

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