We Went Looking for the Cover-Up. Then We Found the Top Drawer.

We Went Looking for the Cover-Up. Then We Found the Top Drawer.

A F’nAround investigation into thousands of Illinois Public Access Counselor files, the roughly 140 matters we have examined so far, and a question much larger than regulation: What happens when the office designed to review government secrecy simply never decides?

When we first started filing Freedom of Information Act requests, our theory was relatively simple.

Find the records.

Compare what government agencies said publicly with what their own documents showed internally.

Identify discrepancies.

Document them.

Publish them.

We thought we were studying departments.

Then the research changed.

Our earliest work concentrated heavily on the Illinois cannabis regulatory system and the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. We were looking at allegations and records concerning ownership, financial activity, regulatory compliance, marketing involving or potentially affecting children, licensing, enforcement and other conduct that had been reported to regulators.

Those investigations raised increasingly serious questions about what IDFPR knew, what it investigated, what it referred elsewhere, and what it did or did not do with information submitted to it. News flash they hid it and covered it up.

But eventually we encountered a structural problem.

If an agency improperly withholds public records, Illinois has already created a governmental mechanism designed specifically to address that problem.

It is called the Public Access Counselor, housed within the Office of the Illinois Attorney General.

So we moved one level higher.

And that is where this story stopped being primarily about IDFPR.

Because once we began examining the PAC system itself, we discovered something sitting inside the state’s records that was far more interesting than any individual FOIA denial:

the unresolved cases.

We call it the Top Drawer.

And since February, we’ve been trying to empty it.

First, What Is the “Top Drawer”?

It isn’t an official government term.

It’s ours.

We’re using it to describe a category of PAC matters that appear in the records we obtained but, according to the dataset we are analyzing, did not receive the kind of substantive determination that would finally resolve the transparency dispute.

The distinction matters.

A public body denies records.

A requester challenges that denial.

The challenge reaches the government office specifically responsible for reviewing FOIA disputes.

And then?

That is the question.

We obtained a dataset containing more than 3,000 PAC matters for examination. We are nowhere near finished. At the time of this article, we have worked through only roughly 140 files.

That means everything that follows should be understood as an interim research finding, not a statistical conclusion about the complete population.

But 140 cases are enough to begin asking better questions.

And what surprised us most wasn’t how similar the agencies were.

It was how similar the information being fought over was.

We Expected Cannabis. We Found Government.

Our original regulatory work conditioned us to look for an industry.

Cannabis.

Banking.

Licensing.

Maybe healthcare.

Maybe politically connected businesses.

That’s not what jumped out of the PAC files we’ve reviewed.

The unresolved matters we’ve examined cross industries and levels of government.

They involve:

police and law enforcement; internal affairs and officer discipline; criminal investigations; public schools and universities; government hiring; municipal administration; economic-development programs; public grants; procurement; personnel decisions; regulatory activity; government communications; and the internal processes by which public officials make consequential decisions.

One file, for example, involves a reporter seeking records from the McLean County Sheriff’s Office concerning complaints against sworn employees, investigations of those complaints and resulting discipline.

The Sheriff’s Office initially characterized the request as unduly burdensome and invoked FOIA §7(1)(n). Records were subsequently released, but the requester returned to PAC challenging entire pages that remained redacted and asking PAC to determine whether each invocation of the exemption was actually related to an “adjudication.”

That’s not IDFPR.

That’s police accountability.

Another matter concerns records requested from the Chicago Police Department about the duties performed by a particular sergeant over a period stretching back to 2004, including assignments involving Chicago public schools. CPD responded that it did not compile or maintain records reflecting the requested information in the ordinary course of business, while providing a class description and relevant special orders. The response explicitly directed the requester to PAC if he wished to challenge the determination.

Another involves the DeKalb Police Department and records connected with an incident at Hopkins Park. The department invoked the ongoing-criminal-investigation exemption and provisions of the Juvenile Court Act, again directing the requester to PAC for review.

And that’s where our original theory began falling apart.

There wasn’t one industry connecting these files.

There was something else.

The Pattern Isn’t What Government Did. It’s How Government Did It.

This may be the most significant preliminary finding from the approximately 140 matters we’ve reviewed.

A surprising number concern information located one layer beneath a publicly observable government outcome.

Think about the difference.

The public knows that someone received a government grant.

The records underneath that outcome can reveal:

Who evaluated the application?

What score did it receive?

Who recommended the recipient?

Who approved the award?

Was the published selection process actually followed?

Likewise, the public can know that a police officer remains employed.

The underlying records can reveal:

How many complaints were made?

What did Internal Affairs investigate?

What did investigators conclude?

What did command staff recommend?

Was anyone disciplined?

The public can know someone got a government job.

The records underneath that decision may show:

Who recommended the candidate?

What did the search committee say?

What alternatives were considered?

The public sees the decision.

FOIA allows the public to reconstruct the machinery that produced it.

And many of the disputes we’re encountering concern precisely that second category.

That is a very different transparency problem.

The Government-Money Files.

Some of the most consequential material we’ve encountered concerns public money.

These disputes are particularly important because transparency after government spending isn’t enough to meaningfully audit government.

Knowing that Organization X received $5 million tells you something.

Knowing why Organization X received $5 million instead of Organizations Y and Z tells you much more.

Grant and economic-development disputes in the files concern records such as merit-review materials, evaluations, agency approvals, written determinations, worksheets and documentation capable of reconstructing how government awards were made.

That distinction is fundamental.

Imagine a government program advertised as competitive.

The final award list establishes who won.

But it doesn’t establish whether the competition worked as represented.

For that, you need the internal records.

Scores.

Recommendations.

Review sheets.

Communications.

Approval chains.

Exceptions.

Signatures.

Those are the institutional breadcrumbs.

And once we stopped categorizing the cases by industry and started categorizing them by institutional function, the pattern became much easier to see.

Police Files Follow the Same Architecture.

Police accountability looks completely different from economic development until you strip away the subject matter.

Then they’re remarkably similar.

Consider the Invisible Institute matter.

The requester sought complaints against sworn Sheriff’s Office employees, investigations into those complaints and disciplinary consequences. According to the filing, the office initially asserted undue burden, produced a suspension letter while withholding other material under §7(1)(n), and subsequently released additional responsive records after PAC became involved. The requester then filed another Request for Review challenging full-page redactions.

The substantive question isn’t merely whether a complaint existed.

It’s whether the public can reconstruct the accountability process:

Complaint → investigation → findings → recommendation → discipline → appeal.

Now compare that with a grant:

Application → evaluation → score → recommendation → approval → award.

Or hiring:

Application → committee review → recommendation → appointment.

Different government functions.

Same information architecture.

What repeatedly becomes contentious is the middle of the chain.

Government will often publicly disclose the beginning and the end.

Someone applied.

Someone won.

Someone complained.

Someone remained employed.

An investigation occurred.

A decision was made.

But the records necessary to understand how A became B are frequently where transparency litigation begins.

That is why we no longer think “industry” is the best unit of analysis.

The better variable may be governmental discretion.

The Exemptions Matter Because They Tell Us Where the Friction Is.

FOIA disputes aren’t random arguments over paperwork.

The exemptions themselves tell us what kind of information government considers sensitive.

Across the material we’ve reviewed, disputes repeatedly implicate categories involving:

investigations, adjudication, personnel information, privacy, deliberation, confidential sources, law-enforcement activity and records whose disclosure is alleged to interfere with ongoing proceedings.

For example, the DeKalb matter cited §7(1)(d)(vii), asserting that disclosure would obstruct an ongoing criminal investigation, along with §7.5(bb) concerning information protected by the Juvenile Court Act.

Other records in the collection discuss privacy redactions and §7(1)(d)(iv), including protection of confidential sources and people providing information to administrative, investigative, law-enforcement or penal agencies. pdf24_merged-compressed.pdf

Those exemptions can be completely legitimate.

That’s important.

Government obviously cannot publish every Social Security number, confidential informant identity, juvenile record or legitimately protected investigative detail simply because somebody submits a FOIA.

Our investigation isn’t based on the proposition that redaction equals corruption.

It doesn’t.

The important question is what happens when a requester says:

You applied that exemption incorrectly.

Illinois created PAC to answer precisely that kind of question.

And that brings us back upstairs.

We Started With the Agency. Then We Realized the Oversight Layer Matters More.

This was the conceptual shift in our investigation.

Initially, when an agency withheld something, we studied the agency.

Why did IDFPR withhold it?

Why did a police department redact it?

Why didn’t a municipality provide it?

Why did an economic-development agency characterize something as deliberative?

Eventually we realized that approach only examines Level One of the system.

Illinois built a Level Two.

Under FOIA, requesters denied access can seek review from the Public Access Counselor in the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.

That changes the institutional equation.

If an agency interprets FOIA too aggressively, there is an oversight mechanism.

If an agency misapplies an exemption, there is an oversight mechanism.

If an agency improperly denies public records, there is an oversight mechanism.

Which means persistent opacity cannot be studied solely by counting agency denials.

You also have to study what the oversight mechanism does with those denials.

That’s where our research went next.

The Top Drawer Is Really a Latency Problem.

The phrase “Top Drawer” sounds conspiratorial.

The research question doesn’t have to be.

In institutional analysis, we can describe the phenomenon much more precisely:

decision latency.

How long does a dispute remain unresolved?

What types of disputes receive determinations?

What types don’t?

Does subject matter predict resolution time?

Does the agency involved predict resolution time?

Does the exemption asserted predict it?

Does the political sensitivity of the underlying record predict it?

Does the amount of public money involved matter?

Does the identity or institutional importance of the public body matter?

Most importantly:

Does delay operate as a functional form of nondisclosure even when nobody formally denies disclosure?

That’s a much bigger question.

A document released five years after the government decision it explains may technically have been disclosed.

Its democratic value may nevertheless be radically diminished.

A reporter investigating an elected official needs records while the official is still accountable to voters.

A reporter investigating government spending needs records while the program is active.

A citizen investigating police misconduct needs information while witnesses, litigation and disciplinary mechanisms remain relevant.

Transparency therefore has a temporal dimension.

Information delayed can become information functionally denied.

And that means an oversight body’s backlog isn’t merely an administrative statistic.

Depending on its distribution, it can become a governance mechanism.

About 140 Down. More Than 3,000 to Go.

This is where we need to be extremely careful.

We are not claiming that our approximately 140 reviewed matters statistically represent every file in the larger dataset.

They don’t.

We haven’t coded the entire population.

We haven’t finished classifying outcomes.

We haven’t established a control group of quickly resolved PAC cases matched by year, agency, exemption and request complexity.

Those are necessary steps before making causal claims.

What we can say is that our preliminary review has produced a strong enough pattern to justify doing exactly that analysis.

The categories emerging so far include:

law-enforcement accountability and misconduct; internal investigations; employee discipline; criminal investigations; public employment; education administration; grants and economic development; government spending; municipal decision-making; regulatory authority; and records revealing internal governmental deliberation or approval.

That’s extraordinarily different from where this project began.

We went into FOIA looking at cannabis regulation.

We came out asking whether Illinois’s transparency enforcement architecture itself can be quantitatively audited.

And Then There Is IDFPR.

Our own IDFPR experience is what initially pushed us toward the larger question.

But it should be treated as a case study within the research rather than proof of the conclusion.

One recent request concerning Sway Dispensary asked IDFPR for authorization forms, policies, procedures and records concerning third-party pickup or transfer of agent identification cards.

We explicitly told the Department that personally identifying information could be redacted and asked it to confirm if no authorization or approval records existed.

The request also disclosed the underlying allegation we were investigating: that badge handling was being used in connection with concealed ownership and avoidance of Illinois’s dispensary ownership cap.

IDFPR didn’t immediately answer whether those authorization records existed.

Instead, it invoked a FOIA extension under §3(e)(v), explaining that the requested records required examination by personnel with the competence and discretion necessary to determine whether they were exempt or should be released with deletions.

Again:

An extension isn’t evidence of wrongdoing.

But from a research perspective, it gives us another measurable event.

Request.

Agency.

Subject.

Date.

Extension.

Statutory justification.

Response.

Production.

PAC appeal.

PAC action.

PAC determination.

Elapsed time.

Once thousands of those observations exist, we don’t have to argue about impressions anymore.

We can measure the system.

The Attorney General’s Own FOIA Response Shows Why Nuance Matters.

There is actually evidence in our records demonstrating why we shouldn’t simply characterize every delay as concealment.

When we FOIA’d records from the Attorney General’s Office itself, the office produced material in batches and explained its redactions. In one March 18, 2026 response, the Attorney General stated:

“We have withheld no records.”

It explained that mailing addresses and signatures had been redacted as private information and, importantly, disclosed that hundreds of pages contained redactions that had not been performed by the Attorney General’s Office because the records had already been redacted when submitted. The office further stated that it did not possess unredacted copies of those pages.

That matters enormously to this investigation.

Because it demonstrates the difference between:

delay followed by production

and

delay without substantive resolution.

We shouldn’t combine them.

In fact, the Attorney General’s completed rolling productions may eventually provide a useful methodological comparison against PAC matters that remain unresolved.

That makes the investigation stronger, not weaker.

What Would “Protection” Actually Mean?

This is where rhetoric has to give way to doctoral-level institutional analysis.

It would be premature to say:

PAC protected crimes.

The files we’ve reviewed don’t establish that proposition.

What we can test is something much more precise.

Suppose an agency withholds records that could expose misconduct.

The requester appeals.

Suppose PAC never substantively resolves the dispute.

The original agency’s withholding then remains operationally intact.

PAC does not necessarily have to affirm the agency.

It does not necessarily have to agree with the agency.

It doesn’t even necessarily have to consciously decide to protect the agency.

Non-resolution itself preserves the status quo.

That’s institutional inertia.

And institutional inertia can have protective effects regardless of intent.

That’s the distinction that matters.

In organizational theory, outcomes do not require centralized conspiracies.

Systems can produce consistent outcomes through incentives, bottlenecks, discretion, resource allocation, prioritization and procedural delay.

The question isn’t initially:

Who ordered this?

It’s:

What does the system repeatedly produce?

Only after establishing the outcome pattern should researchers begin investigating causation.

Our Hypothesis Has Changed.

We began with something close to:

Are individual Illinois agencies concealing misconduct?

Our working hypothesis is now substantially broader:

Does Illinois’s public-records enforcement architecture systematically produce greater decision latency for disputes involving records capable of exposing governmental misconduct, discretionary decision-making, investigations, discipline, public spending or politically consequential administrative processes?

That’s testable.

And importantly, it’s falsifiable.

Maybe we finish the 3,000-plus matters and discover no statistically meaningful difference.

Maybe mundane FOIA disputes sit unresolved just as frequently.

Maybe case complexity explains everything.

Maybe staffing explains it.

Maybe certain exemptions inherently require dramatically more analysis.

Maybe the pattern disappears when controlling for year and complexity.

If that’s what the data shows, that’s what we’ll publish.

But the first roughly 140 files have given us enough reason to keep opening the drawer.

What We’re Going to Measure

Every file can become a row in a dataset.

Agency.

Government level.

Request date.

PAC submission date.

Subject matter.

Type of requester.

Journalist or citizen.

Records requested.

FOIA exemption asserted.

Whether misconduct is alleged.

Whether public money is implicated.

Whether police conduct is implicated.

Whether employment discipline is implicated.

Whether an investigation is implicated.

Whether internal decision-making is implicated.

PAC response.

Binding opinion.

Nonbinding determination.

Informal resolution.

Closure.

No identifiable substantive resolution.

Elapsed days.

Years outstanding.

Administration during which the matter arose.

That turns “they don’t answer the uncomfortable ones” from a rhetorical accusation into a hypothesis capable of empirical testing.

And that’s where this project becomes considerably more interesting.

Because the Drawer Itself May Be the Dataset.

At first we thought the documents government wouldn’t release were the story.

Now we’re not sure.

The cases in which government never definitively decides whether those documents should have been released may be the bigger story.

The distinction sounds subtle.

It isn’t.

FOIA creates transparency rights.

Agencies create the records.

Agencies decide initially whether to disclose them.

PAC exists as an oversight mechanism when those decisions are challenged.

If consequential transparency disputes can remain unresolved long enough, the practical effect is that the original agency’s decision governs by default.

No binding precedent is created.

No public body is necessarily told it was wrong.

No requester necessarily receives the disputed information.

And the underlying governmental event moves farther into the past.

That is why we’re studying the drawer.

Cannabis regulatory violation coverup Was the Door. Government Accountability Was the Room.

We thought we were investigating cannabis.

Then we thought we were investigating IDFPR.

Then we thought we were investigating how multiple Illinois agencies handled allegations and records involving potentially serious misconduct.

Eventually we realized those were all nodes in a much larger system.

The regulator is overseen.

The denial can be appealed.

The appeal goes somewhere.

The somewhere has records.

And those records have outcomes or sometimes an absence of outcomes.

So we FOIA’d the oversight mechanism.

And now we’re reading its files.

One by one.

Police complaints.

Internal affairs.

Officer discipline.

Criminal investigations.

Government grants.

Economic-development awards.

Hiring.

Schools.

Personnel decisions.

Municipal government.

Regulatory decisions.

Public money.

Internal recommendations.

The industries change.

The agencies change.

The requesters change.

But one preliminary characteristic keeps appearing:

people are asking for the records necessary to determine not merely what government did, but how and why government did it.

Those are the receipts of administrative power.

And those are precisely the records a functioning transparency regime is supposed to make possible to audit.

We have reviewed only around 140 matters.

There are more than 3,000 to examine.

So this isn’t our conclusion.

It’s the beginning of the experiment.

Since February, F’nAround has been emptying what we call the Illinois Attorney General Public Access Counselor’s “Top Drawer.”

We started because we wanted to understand what happened to our records requests.

Now we’re trying to understand what happened to everybody else’s.

And if the pattern survives the remaining thousands of files, the question won’t be whether one cannabis regulator failed to provide transparency.

It will be considerably larger:

What happens to democratic oversight when the institution responsible for reviewing government secrecy becomes another layer of the delay?

About 140 files down.

More than 3,000 to go.

We’re still opening the drawer.

The full list of top-drawer files we have been emptying since February.