There are more than 500 reports by state agencies due to the legislature by statutory mandate. They cover performance, spending, work culture, data collection and anything else lawmakers want to know about.
And according to the joint Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency Program Evaluator, Rebecca Hobbes, 57 of them are obsolete.
"Meaning a report for which the due date has passed or the requirement expired, while the mandate continues to exist," Hobbes said to lawmakers during a Thursday meeting at the state capitol. That leaves 453 mandated reports for various state agencies to submit, which are considered active. And, Hobbes said, based on a limited survey LOFT conducted of 70 state agencies, the problem of non-compliance is common and multifaceted.
"83% of the responding agencies said they have statutorily required reports," she said. "Twelve replied that they did not have any reporting requirements, while five said they didn't know or weren't sure if they had required reports."When LOFT asked those agencies to provide a tabulation of all reports they were aware of, many lists sent over were incomplete, Hobbes said."One of the most common omissions related to reporting requirements was those directed to all agencies, rather than agencies specified by name," She said.
Some state agencies never become aware they have a report due, others have decided some reports were no longer important and just stopped producing them. Others are still trying to comply with the mandates and have no way to submit them except by snail mail.
Additionally, many of the reports are required to be submitted to one or more elected officials or other state agencies, which can create confusion and bog down the information being passed around.
Lawmakers in both parties say they are committed to updating the process with a centralized, public clearinghouse for submitting and accessing the documents.
Republican Senators Julie Daniels from Bartlesville and Chuck Hall from Perry raised questions about how the legislature can better notify state agency officials that a new report is mandated and where to submit it. There is an existing State Filing System, both lawmakers pointed out.
"How much of that, again, is maybe back on the legislature?" Hall said, "If you have a report done by legislation that says report to the speaker,... or the pro tem and the governor. We did not direct them to report it to the state filing system… it may be that we might have the functionality already in place, but we would need in the future then to direct that to the centralized system."
But the notification process is only part of the issue.
Making the information accessible to lawmakers and the general public is just as important, said Sen. Regina Goodwin, D-Tulsa. She said while ensuring agencies are aware of their responsibilities, at the heart of the issue is access to public information.
One example that stood out to Goodwin is the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services' 2020 decision to stop publishing state employee pay raises each year because they interpreted new polices to mean the report was no longer relevant.
"Often, the public doesn't know what the updates are to legislation," Goodwin said. "I think we have separate tasks of notifying the agencies and then some 4 million folks in Oklahoma."
Sen. Hall, who chairs the LOFT committee, agreed with Goodwin.
"I think it's mandatory," Hall said. "In my mind, I think that these reports, and anything that we do that is reporting on legislation, policy, budgetary items…it needs to be made available to the public."
Copyright 2025 KOSU
