The deadline for filing annual gift disclosures by legislators and state employees was on Monday, July 1, so I took a few minutes to check out the State Ethics Commission’s Online Public Documents System.

The commission and its consultants struggled for a number years to implement a robust disclosure system that includes effective online public access. The current system went “live” at the beginning of 2018 and has been phased in over time.

The system now provides public access to financial disclosures, candidate financial disclosures, gift disclosures, and different kinds of lobbyist disclosures.

So I went to the disclosure homepage and selected “Gift Disclosures,” then “2019 Gift/Travel”. While the page is loading, the system displays a logo, “Powered by Salesforce”. Following that is a copyright notice, “Copyright 2019, State of Hawaii, All Rights Reserved.”

What in the world does that mean in a system displaying public records? I haven’t the faintest idea, since it’s not referring to the underlying computer software. Anyway, I guess that qualifies as issue #1.

The first page of data is a list of those filing disclosures. It looks like this.

The first problem is that you probably don’t know who a lot of these people are, and they aren’t identified by job title or department, at least not when the list first comes up. We’ll call that issue #2.

The previous system was, in this regard, much more user friendly, and presented both bits of information–job title and department–in the top level listing.

But let’s push ahead in the new system. There are two filings by William Aila, submitted just two minutes apart. The second is identified as an amendment.

Clicking the amended form, you see that Aila reported no gifts received during the year. But keep in mind that since state law only requires disclosure of gifts valued at more than $200 from the same source, there might be additional gifts that fall below the disclosure threshold.

Also notice that Aila’s position is not listed in the top level of information, but below in a separate section, “State Position.” On my laptop, I have to scroll down just a bit to see that.

Since Aina reports no gifts, I’ll go back to the list and select someone who likely did receive disclosable gifts.

Issue #3. I click to go back to the list. It takes perhaps seven seconds to reload the list. If you really want to check more than one or two names, this is going to get very tedious.

Scrolling down, there’s the Attorney General, Clare Connors. Click on the link to the left of her name, and a form comes up showing she received a gift valued at $1,240.09 that was reported in 2019. The time needed to search for and load the form seems to vary.

Scroll down again, and there’s a summary line showing each gift/travel item.

Click on the link, and after a few ore seconds you’ll see a screen with details, including the full description and the date received.

So let’s say you want to browse through the gift disclosures filed by members of the state senate. How do you do that?

Let’s find out. There’s a search box at the top of the list. I enter the search term, “senate”. Press return.

The screen dims for a few seconds, and then comes back.

Blank. “0 items” found. So that search doesn’t work. Then I noticed over on the right, a symbol for “filter”. I clicked that. No help. “Locked Filters” is the message displayed.

So I’m pretty much at a loss about how to narrow the list of filers to members of the Senate, House, particular departments, etc. And without that ability, the system doesn’t seem useable.

Fiddling around, I found that the search function will find a particular name. So I search for “Ige” to see the governor’s gift disclosure.

Again, “0 items.” It seems the governor’s gift disclosure hasn’t been made public yet, or hasn’t been filed.

Well, so far this has been an exercise in frustration. I’m hoping that I’m missing something important here, and that if I were just a bit sharper, I would have immediately been able to focus down on legislators, or officials of the university, or other subgroups, and then quickly do a preliminary scan through their reported gifts.

At present, though, the system doesn’t seem to lend itself to that kind of review.

Please, someone tell me I’m wrong.