Only two Illinois counties in the WNIJ listening area passed The Illinois Policy Institute audit of online government transparency.
Kane County was the only one to earn a perfect score of 100 points. DeKalb County placed eleventh with 60 point 9 points. Only three of the 102 Illinois counties scored 90 percent or higher.
The Local Transparency Project based grades on 10 categories of information published on the county website, with up to 10 points awarded in areas such as audits, employee compensation, contracts, budgets, lobbying and tax information.
The Institute found almost all county websites lacked key information. In four categories, more than 90 counties had failed.
Twenty-two counties didn’t even have websites. The 80 counties with websites compiled an average score of 32.8. Almost all of those websites were missing key information.