The lack of online financial disclosures of state and county officials

On Friday I read this MarylandReporter.com article about the inability of our state-level leaders to create a simple law that would require online financial disclosures of state and county officials. If you want to find out what our leaders have financially disclosed about themselves you have to travel down to Annapolis and look up the information!   It is as if our leaders are in some type of time warp. This is the Internet era, it is not 1950. Public officials should expect to have their information online. If they do not like that public aspect of the job then they should not become public officials.

Delegate Maggie McIntosh of Baltimore was quoted in the MarylandReporter.com article. McIntosh said she supported the disclosure legislation, BUT at the same time she came up with lame excuses to delay the process. She tried to say that some states do things differently then Maryland. WHO CARES? What are you scared of? The information is already public, just put it online or DO NOT HOLD PUBLIC OFFICE. You are our public SERVANT, you are not our master who deserves to have public information hidden offline in some hard to access room in Annapolis.

Lots of Delegate McIntosh’s information is already online! It just is not in one easy to find place that would allow reporters and voters to learn more about her.  For the benefit of the the citizens of Maryland I did some online research on Friday and came up with the following information:

Maggie McIntosh is the president of a company called The McIntosh Files, LLC. Here is an example of what that company has produced:

Propaganda for one of the worst city councilmen in Baltimore!

Here is a link to a Maggie McIntosh mortgage document.

It appears that McIntosh had something to do with a property in Delaware. You can check out basic information about that here and here (select Sussex County and type in her name).

It is important to note that in order to look up mortgage information in Maryland I have to log into an account that traces back to my name. I believe there is a way to see who has viewed your mortgage documents. I have no idea how the notification process works, but I do know that I did the mortgage search on Friday and on Saturday night Delegate McIntosh started to follow both of my Twitter accounts. I did not publicly post this story until today (Tuesday).  Maryland already provides some beneficial transparency when it comes to regular citizens and their real estate related records, it is about time that same type of online transparency is applied to our leaders at one easy to navigate online location.