The State Procurement Office web site is still “down” following a hacking incident, reported earlier by the Advertiser.

Try to access the State Procurement Office web site and you see this message:

Site under maintenance

State Procurement Office services are temporarily unavailable.

Please try again later…

Mahalo for your understanding.

The timing is unfortunate, since I had just had a small victory on the question of public disclosure of certain contracts for legal services. I had noticed that while most SPO contract lists reported the names of the contractors, a category for legal services reported just the case number, “court appointed attorney”, and amount of the payment. No names were disclosed.

I had it on my “to do” list for a while, and finally got around to calling the person in listed as the contact in Budget & Finance, which processes the payments for invoices forwarded from the Judiciary. In turn, she made a call to the procurement office, and a quick determination was made that names of attorneys being paid to serve as court-appointed counsel should indeed be disclosed. I think names appeared for about a week before the whole system went down.

Now comes the more difficult part of retrieving information on prior payments to attorneys.