When Gov. Josh Green recently nominated Honolulu attorney Vladimir Devens to a seat on the Hawaii Supreme Court, he failed to make public one important fact: Devens had for years served as the director a powerful political action committee that had helped put Green in office.

That information became public knowledge only after Devens was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmed by the full Senate. His leadership role with the Be Change Now PAC — affiliated with Pacific Resource Partnership — was never mentioned and the nominee was never asked about it.

When the relationship was revealed in a Civil Beat story days after the confirmation, Green’s office defended the lack of transparency, saying the information was publicly available in the files of the Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, where Be Change Now is registered. 

Devens “has made his past experiences and affiliations completely transparent,” Green’s office said, citing the DCCA filings.

There’s just one problem with that explanation: It’s nearly impossible to search DCCA’s business registrations by a person’s name. Under DCCA’s system, finding Devens’ connection to Be Change Now would require going through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of registrations on the agency’s site.

Such a disclosure might meet a technical or legalistic definition of “disclosure,” said Camron Hurt, program manager of Common Cause Hawaii. But Hurt questioned the adequacy of such a disclosure when it would have been nearly impossible for the average person to find. 

“I don’t think it’s a fair explanation,” he said. “It’s not an example of a government acting in good faith.”

Hawaii Chose Not To Allow The Public To Search By Name

Civil Beat randomly checked other state business records sites and found more than a dozen other states that let the public do such searches. These include western states like Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon. Utah’s website allows the public to do executive name searches but charges a $3 fee.

Other states allowing such searches include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan and Mississippi. Plug a person’s name into these state search engines and it’s possible to see business entities for which the person serves as an officer, member, director or agent.

DCCA considered allowing the public to search business registrations by officer name when it set up its online system, says Russell Castagnaro, former president of the Hawaii Information Consortium, which established the online business registration system in the early 2000s. 

But Hawaii opted not to do that, Castagnaro said.

“That capability to do a search for officers – that was something a lot of people had a lot of discomfort with,” he said.

The concerns involved issues related to privacy and worries that people could be defrauded if such information was readily available, he said.

Also troublesome was the idea that a person’s connection to a business would be subject to public scrutiny even after the business had been dissolved, he said.

Instead, DCCA opted to make such searches feasible, but only for DCCA staff, Castagnaro said. A member of the public could get the information, but DCCA would have to do the search.

Another option, he said, was to let the public buy the entire database.

“Anybody who buys that has access to it,” Catagnaro said.

Subscriptions Cost $1,000 Per Month

In the past Honolulu lawyer Jim Wright regularly availed himself of DCCA’s executive name searches. Such research was typically done by DCCA staff for free and was a routine and important step in conducting due diligence related to legal matters, Wright said.

That included doing things like looking for assets that parties might be trying to hide, and to identify actual or potential conflicts with law firm clients, he said.

But earlier this year, Wright learned DCCA wouldn’t do that anymore.

“We are unable to search by persons’ name due to our office regulations,” Emily Wen, of DCCA’s Business Registration Division wrote in an Oct. 3 email after Wright asked for information about two individuals. “You may search based on the business name on the Hawaii Business Express website at hbe.ehawaii.gov.”

“I was really surprised,” Wright said. “I thought, ‘Wow this is a big deal.’”

William Nhieu, a spokesman for DCCA, wouldn’t comment on Castagnaro’s and Wright’s assertions that the agency in the past would conduct searches based on an officer or executive’s name.

“We are not able to verify or validate that,” he said, and added that the agency can perform such searches but does so only for law enforcement, not the general public.

In addition, he said, a person can pay $1,000 a month for access to the database, which is updated weekly. A subscriber can search registrations by officer name, he said.

DCCA’s lack of transparency has implications beyond lawyers doing due diligence. The agency’s opacity also can shroud the connections of government officials, and is far less transparent than other states. For instance, plug the name “Saban” into Alabama’s business registration site, and you can see a list of businesses connected to the state’s highest-paid public employee, University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, and his wife Terry.

In Hawaii, finding what businesses public offcials are connected to is considerably harder.

Making the Wicker-Dela Cruz Connection

Consider, for example, Dane Wicker, the deputy director of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. A financial disclosure required by state ethics laws shows that in addition to a state salary of $100,000 to $150,000, Wicker earned or received $10,000 to $25,000 from Wicker Enterprises LLC. 

Type “Wicker Enterprises LLC” into DCCA’s business search site, however, and all you can see is that Wicker is the agent and sole manager of the LLC. There’s no way to search deeper — to see, for instance, what companies Wicker or his Wicker Enterprises are connected to.

Wicker Enterprises is a partner with Wicker’s former boss, Hawaii Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Donovan Dela Cruz, in a tea company called Kilani Brew LLC. But the only way to see the connection between the state’s second-highest economic development official and the senator who controls the state’s finances is to search for Kilani Brew on the DCCA site.

“If you can’t search by officer name, you cannot identify business associations,” Wright said. “And that makes it impossible to vet people, but also to be fully informed about who you’re dealing with.”

There are some services that acquire the entire business registration database and allow customers to conduct searches by executive and officer name, Wright said. But the services require expensive subscriptions, he said, and some aren’t available to the general public.

Wicker and Dela Cruz did not respond to requests for comment.

The Elusive Devens-Green Connection

In Devens’ case, the governor never mentioned the connection when announcing Devens’ nomination, although Green did share that Devens was a director for the nonprofit Crime Stoppers Honolulu, Inc. and a former police officer.

Devens also left his connection to Be Change Now off the resume that was given to the Senate Judiciary Committee before his confirmation hearing.

In fact, Devens’ connection to Be Change Now was made public only when Civil Beat published an article based on a confidential tip. A business name search using Be Change Now, not Devens’ name, corroborated the tip.

Common Cause’s Hurt said all this should have been plainly disclosed to the public before Devens’ confirmation — and not just buried in a business registration that most people have no idea how to access.

He said it’s important to know more about why DCCA won’t let the public search business registrations by officer name.

“Not letting the DCCA filing be accessible to the public without adequate reasoning only fans the flames of the idea that the government works from within an exclusive circle that prefers to keep things behind closed doors,” Hurt said.