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Other parts of the Open Checkbook site break down expenditures by vendor or by relatively abstract “spending categories” instead of by department.Īt lower levels, one also encounters some of the neat twists added by the site’s creators. And then, by hovering over a vendor’s name, you can pull up “Vendor Details” and eventually see a particular expenditure on a particular date, including the Fund Name and Account Name. If you persist in clicking down through the table on the left, you eventually see payments made to individual vendors. View the percentages of different expenditures by hovering over parts of the pie chart, and then view (for instance) the different Departments of Revenue by clicking on its segment in the pie chart.
Massachusetts open checkbook plus#
View “Administration and Finance” in more detail by clicking on the plus sign next to its row in the table.
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You can investigate expenditures by drilling down in two ways: However, it makes sense once you realize that the pie chart reflects a breakdown of expenses within a particular category: for instance, what percentage of “Administration and Finance” went to various commitments, such as the Department of Revenue. At this high level, the pie chart strikes one as odd because it shows an entirely different breakdown of expenditures from the table on the left. For instance, choosing “View by Department” gives you a table of expenditures at a high level of abstraction, ranging from “Administration and Finance” to “Transportation.” An attractive pie chart also appears. To get to the home page, visit the main Massachusetts government portal, look down the right-hand side, and click on “Open Checkbook.” You can then explore finances along several dimensions. The steering committee has been eager to add context to data, helping visitors who are uninitiated in the arcanery of state budgeting get a sense of what expenditures are for. The approach being used in Open Checkbook is based on the experience they had developing the state’s stimulus program, and the website that Director Simon’s office created for that program. The site is run by a steering committee formed by the Governor and Treasurer and made up of members of their staffs.
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I discussed Open Checkbook with Jeffrey Simon, who works for the Governor as the director of the state’s economic stimulus program and who was involved in the Open Checkbook from the beginning. This is highly welcome in a tight economy, especially in a state that is still often unfairly tarred as “Taxachusetts,” decades after tax rates were lowered–a state where news of patronage and pension scandals is common enough to get tiresome–a state where cynical voters have put referendum questions on the ballot in favor of lower taxes at least three times. With Open Checkbook you can find out where the money goes in the Massachusetts state government, right down to particular salaries or particular payments to vendors. The results can give us some insight into the effort it takes at each stage to release government data–and even more significantly, what it takes to increase the data’s value.Īs a finance project, Open Checkbook hones in on one area of open government: how it spends. I decided to take a look at what’s offered and what’s missing from this site, and to ask someone in the government here in Massachusetts to describe their thinking in creating the site. The site launched to some acclaim and has received over 220,000 hits. On December 5, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick joined with state treasurer Steven Grossman to create an open government initiative with the promising moniker Open Checkbook.