IF YOU HAVE EVER tried to sell a house, you may have taken the trouble to find out what similar houses in your neighborhood sold for lately. You may have glanced at the sanitation rating of a restaurant. Or checked to see what complaints had been filed against a child care center before entrusting your toddler to it.

We take for granted the ability to mine such information, just as we take for granted the fact that signs will be posted alerting us if the owners of the property next door want special government permission to open a landfill — and that we’ll be able to look elected officials in the eye when they decide whether to grant it.

We have access to all this information because of the state’s Freedom of Information Act, which makes most government documents available and most government meetings open to the public.

The information available to us through this law goes far beyond individual concerns, to matters affecting society as a whole. This law allows us to find out if the mayor is arrested for drunken driving or the school board fills the payroll with relatives; it’s this law that lets you know to ask the legislator who’s talking about his support of public education why he voted consistently to slash school funding.

As Gov. Mark Sanford said in proclaiming this our state’s first Open Government Week, “a well-informed public is vital to our democratic society” because “conducting government business openly enables the people of our state to be knowledgeable about the formulation of public policy as well as the people involved in the process.”

Unfortunately, there are gaps in our Freedom of Information Act. We seal shut most ethics complaints made against public officials — and punish anyone who dares speak of those complaints. We allow governmental bodies to fire people in private, without explanation, so we never know if it was a wise call. The Legislature needs to close these and other gaps.

But these gaps are insignificant when compared with the gaping holes in compliance. It is commonplace for governmental bodies to manipulate the open meetings law — shuttling officials in and out of meetings, for example, so that a quorum is never present at once, so they can conduct public business in private. Other officials simply ignore the law, doing public business secretly or refusing to turn over public documents, and then daring anyone to file a lawsuit. When they are sued, governments often lose; but the vast majority of the time, they’re not sued, so they get away with it.

Attorney General Henry McMaster, like attorneys general before him, routinely advises officials to interpret exceptions to the law as narrowly as possible and to treat the law not as a privacy act, as too many do, but as the disclosure act the Legislature intended. The basic rule, he says, is “When in doubt, disclose.”

We have access to much information in our state; we have a legal and a moral right to much more. We need clearer language that can prevent end runs around the law. We need stronger punishments for governments and individual officials who violate it outright. And we need to challenge violations, in court if necessary. As long as the law is so frequently ignored, Open Government Week cannot be a celebration in South Carolina; it must be a call to arms.