State law requires near immediate access to officials’ financial disclosures. LA County is taking far longer

To help ensure government decisions are in the public’s best interest, California law requires many officials to disclose their financial interests on public forms.

Those disclosures — known as form 700s — report officials’ outside income, gifts and investments so the public can see whether those conflict with their decisions.

State law says they’re public records, and that agencies have to make each disclosure available to the public within two business days of it being filed.

But attorneys for the nation’s biggest county government are taking longer than that. Much longer — citing difficulty pulling a large number of records at one time.

In late August, LAist requested the disclosures filed by employees of L.A. County Counsel Dawyn Harrison’s office since 2023. Ten days after the request, her office hadn’t provided any records. Instead, officials sent a letter saying they needed time to review a large volume of documents and that they’d give status updates every 30 days. The two-day disclosure requirement is noted in the county’s copy of a state guide about processing the forms:

A notice of the two-day public disclosure requirement for officials’ financial interest disclosures, known as form 700s, in a state guide within the county’s records.

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L.A. County

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Since then, the County Counsel’s Office has provided a portion of records required by law to be made available within two days of filing.

So far, more than a month since all records were requested, LAist has received 241 disclosures. That’s fewer than a third of the more than 850 disclosures the office says are covered by the records request.

In response to written questions from LAist this week, Harrison’s office said they’re processing the forms for release “as quickly as possible.”

“While the [state] requires these public records to be made available within two business days when requested, it is highly unlikely that it was contemplated that a requestor would ask for 850+ such records at one time,” said the statement, attributed to County Counsel.

They said the delay is due to how the records are kept. Because of a recent change in computer systems, they said office staff has to manually pull each form filed in 2023 and part of 2024 from an older system, according to the office.

“We do not have the resources to pull and review over 850 records within two days,” the statement said. “Nor is it reasonable to expect an agency to do so.”

What the law says

California’s Political Reform Act says that every filing under that law — including form 700s — “is a public record open for public inspection and reproduction” during regular business hours, "commencing as soon as practicable, and no later than the second business day after the day it was received.”

David Loy, a public records attorney and legal director with the First Amendment Coalition, said the law means any preparations for public release — such as redactions — should be done within two business days of forms being filed so that the public can get copies upon request.

“As I read the statute, it requires the filing officer to ensure that the reports are available for public inspection or copying no later than two business days after they are received,” Loy said.

If that's the case, he said, then the forms are supposed to “be available to the public on request within two business days of filing.”

In response, Harrison’s office told LAist they’re “not aware of any law or [state] regulation that requires filing officers to apply redactions to Form 700s as they come in where Form 700s are not posted online.”

Violations of the Political Reform Act can bring a fine of up to $5,000 per violation, enforced by the California Fair Political Practices Commission. It’s commonly known as the FPPC.

Asked who enforces the two-day disclosure requirement within the Political Reform Act, an FPPC spokesperson said it’s up to individual requesters to bring a Public Records Act lawsuit.

“In general, enforcement of the California Public Records Act is handled through the courts. It is up to individuals, not agencies, to enforce the Public Records Act,” said the spokesperson, Shery Yang.

The FPPC’s guide for the two-day requirement, however, says "Access to the Form 700 is not subject to the Public Records Act procedures."

Yang has not yet responded to questions about what that means for enforcement.