The default setting of the bureaucracy is secrecy rather than openness. That's why it wasn't surprising last week when the state attorney general's office issued an opinion holding that Nevada welfare or social service agencies are prohibited from revealing information about children who were killed or injured as a result of abuse.

This is, of course, tremendous news for opponents of government accountability.

In the opinion, Chief Deputy Attorney General Cynthia Pyzel identifies the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as the barrier to making the information public. She seems to embrace the same overly broad interpretation of the 1996 law that has ridiculously kept some hospitals from even acknowledging that an individual is a patient. Notably, Ms. Pyzel does not directly cite any passage from the legislation that specifically forbids public inspection of the data in question.

Interestingly, less than a week before Ms. Pyzel issued her March 23 opinion, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a state law guaranteeing access to public records overrides any HIPAA privacy provisions. A 2004 Texas attorney general opinion reached a similar conclusion.

In addition, Ms. Pyzel acknowledges that a letter from an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services notes that the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act includes "specific reporting elements pertaining to child fatalities that should be required and potentially made public." Why, then, is Ms. Pyzel opting for secrecy?

Assembly Majority Leader Barbara Buckley, a Las Vegas Democrat, reacted quickly to the attorney general opinion, requesting legislation that would require state agencies to make available as much information as legally allowed on child abuse deaths.

Good. The system is a mess -- and nowhere is that more apparent than in a chilling personal "observation" Ms. Pyzel offers in her opinion. When a child dies as a result of abuse, she writes, law enforcement investigates to determine whether criminal charges are warranted. But "the child welfare system typically does not perform an investigation into such cases because, once the child dies, there is no longer a 'child in need of protection.' "

Something is seriously wrong here. And one way to help fix the system is to subject it to increased public scrutiny.