It's the fourth straight year more stores have been caught selling tobacco to underage teens.

"This is not acceptable. We as a state need to be more vigilant to make sure that we are not selling cigarettes to our underage minors," says Lieutenant Governor James "Duke" Aiona.

Keith Yamamoto of the State Health Department says, "The 11.2% that Hawaii is now looking at in terms of our non-compliance rate is actually above the national average of 10.5%."

Many of the underage volunteer school students who helped in the undercover study were on hand to hear the latest results.

304 businesses were visited, not one store on Kauai or Maui illegally sold cigarettes to minors. Five percent of Hawaii Island businesses broke the law. Oahu performed worst with more than 15% of the businesses selling to minors.

Yamamoto says, "I do want to point out that if you look at Oahu as a whole we see the highest rate in the Windward region, which is 31.8%"

State officials will now analyze the data, trying to figure out how to reverse a disturbing trend.

"So this rate now represents a setback for Hawaii of over a decade. This is a significant trend that we want to stop as quickly as we can," says Cheryl Albright from the U.H. Cancer Research Center.

There are good lessons to be learned from the latest study. Albright says, "The overwhelming factor that predicts sales of tobacco to minors is lack of checking id, or checking age of the person attempting to buy tobacco."

And there is more good news.

"We have the lowest teen smoking rates in the nation, only 12.8% of our high school students report that they have smoked a cigarette in past thirty days. The national average is 20 percent," says, Aiona.