Monday, January 27, 2014

Reviewing Government Spending in Real-Time


Developing a website to make government records, especially financial records, transparent can be a monumental and expensive task.  That’s why I’m impressed by the pains taken by New York City to make its innovative Checkbook software available to all.

In January, 2013, an open source platform based on New York City’s Checkbook NYC 2.0 was introduced on YouTube by Comptroller John C. Liu.

The application is available now to any state or local government.  It enables the public to search easily from a dashboard and review government spending in real-time.  

Government contracts and underlying sub-contracts are absorbed and integrated into the website, so overspending can be observed as soon as it begins.

Karl Fogel of Open Tech Strategies, LLC wrote, “...the release of the Checkbook NYC code...is significant because of a larger initiative that accompanies it. Long before the code release, the Comptroller's Office started a serious planning process to ensure that the code could be easily adopted by other municipalities, supported by other vendors, and eventually become a long-term multi-stakeholder project...”

“Most cities run an internal financial management system (FMS) of some kind. The FMS manages the city's expenses, revenue, contracts, payroll, and budget, and naturally allows authorized access only. New York City's FMS just exports its non-sensitive data fields on a regular basis to Checkbook NYC—the export is filtered so that any sensitive data never even goes into the public-facing Checkbook system.”

New York’s Comptroller asked FMS vendors “...to contribute in-kind resources to Checkbook maintenance and development—especially to smooth the Checkbook deployment process. That way you'd lower the bar to Checkbook adoption for many cities at one stroke, and at the same time get multiple vendors involved in the code base.”

Rebecca Williams of the Sunlight Foundation reported, “...in addition to the spending and expenditure information most similar platforms display, [NYC’s Checkbook] includes information about other essential financial datasets (including budgets, revenue, contracts, and payroll), as well.”

“...this might be the first instance of city officials proactively and premeditatively building civic applications with the intent of having other cities -- and cities with varied software vendors at that -- use and contribute to making that software better.”

We should encourage adoption of Checkbook NYC 2.0 in state agencies, counties and municipalities throughout the country.

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