Topeka ? State officials in Kansas legally can use private email accounts to conduct public business without ever disclosing their messages to the public, Attorney General Derek Schmidt said Tuesday.

Schmidt issued a legal opinion saying that individual state employees using private accounts or devices are not covered by the state Open Record Act’s requirement for agencies and other government-funded entities to make their records available to the public. His opinion followed disclosures that state Budget Director Shawn Sullivan used a private email account at least twice in December to circulate details of budget proposals.

Doug Anstaett, the Kansas Press Association’s executive director, said the group will work to correct the “serious flaw” in the law after legislators return Wednesday from their annual spring break. Anstaett called the Republican attorney general’s opinion “a total repudiation” of the records law.

“This decision essentially says government business can legally take place in the shadows,” Anstaett said in a statement. “If we don’t clarify this in statute, we will be handing our government back to the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of the past, an absolutely horrible thought.”

The GOP-dominated state Senate rejected a proposal in March to ensure that the record law covers officials’ private emails about public business. It did so despite the state GOP’s criticism of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of personal email exclusively for official nonclassified business as U.S. secretary of state.

The Wichita Eagle first reported Sullivan’s use of a private email account to circulate budget information in December weeks before Brownback, a Republican, outlined his spending and tax proposals for lawmakers in January. The group receiving the emails included two lobbyists.

Sullivan has said he used the private account because he was working from home during the holidays. Brownback spokeswoman Eileen Hawley said Tuesday that Schmidt’s opinion “confirms the law concerning certain types of open records requests.”

“As we have said previously, we follow all applicable law and regulations in responding to open records requests,” she said in a statement.

The Open Records Act requires government agencies and government-funded entities to make their records available to the public, and the law can cover emails generated by an agency or kept by it. But the act contains dozens of exceptions that allow officials to routinely deny access to records.

Schmidt’s opinion said the act doesn’t define “entity,” so the “common definition and ordinary meaning” must be used. He wrote that an entity “has a legal identity apart from its members or owners” under Kansas law.

“Thus, the ordinary meaning of ‘entity’ does not include any flesh-and-blood being, such as an employee,” Schmidt’s opinion said.

Hensley said: “It just only shows the importance of passing a law to close this loophole.”