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Government Transparency
THE ACT OF ACCOUNTABILITY The Front Line of the Government's Transparency Movement By the oFFiCe oF the State auditor
In 2008, the Utah State Legislature directed the creation of a financial transparency website to allow the public to view general ledger detailed transactions for the State of Utah. Utah was on the cutting edge of what has become known as a “Government Transparency” or “Open Checkbook” initiative. Next, the Legislature expanded the system to include all large- and mediumsized local governments. This expansion created a new reporting requirement for local governments and a litany of technical issues to support more than 500 separate reporting entities, using various accounting systems with their own distinct charts of accounts. The system was designed to ingest one large file each month, but because it was now trying to upload hundreds of files each quarter, delays were starting to occur.
Continuing its push for greater transparency, in 2015 the Legislature again raised the transparency bar (by lowering the reporting threshold) to include essentially all governmental entities, which included another 300 entities.
Ultimately, after a decade without a significant upgrade, and an exploding dataset of millions of records, the user experience had become slow and often frustrating. Upgrading the Experience In 2019, the Legislature transferred operational oversight of the financial transparency website to the Office of the State Auditor (OSA). The OSA quickly went to work to find an upgrade solution. The goal was to significantly improve the user experience — both for those uploading data as well as those searching and analyzing the public financial data.
We reviewed multiple commercial products designed to provide a government transparency platform. But most focused on a one-to-one experience between vendor and governmental entity. While this met the needs of many state governments, Utah was in the unique position of having a unified legacy system with the financial data for almost 1,000 entities — a one-stop shop for Utah citizens — something that other states could only dream of.
As we attempted to integrate the magnitude of entities, it became clear that no viable commercial product existed. Adding to the challenge, the Legislature had not funded the upgrade. While our strong preference was a commercial turnkey, hosted solution, we knew the remaining option was to develop a custom solution, just as had been done a decade before. But many of us had witnessed various expensive failures when governments attempted custom software development projects
Despite our strong reservations, we began. Perhaps having a state auditor with an extensive background in custom software development (and a strong vision for government transparency) as well as a knowledgeable team that understood the data and the desired upgrade, helped to guide us down the development path. We are happy to report our project is a success.
A New Transparent Utah Experience We knew an improved user experience was critical — significantly increasing speed and expanding convenience. We focused on the power of search, placing a search bar conveniently at the top of the page. Built on a powerful search engine and a restructured underlying database, within seconds users can locate employee compensation or vendor payment information across every entity in Transparent Utah. Those results may then be exported into a CSV-formatted file for further analysis in Microsoft Excel or other analysis tools.
We also increased the speed of the detail transaction browser, allowing users to dive into the transaction details of a single governmental entity. Users may view all of the funds, departments, and accounts to identify aggregate amounts or individual transactions on a yearby-year basis. Lastly, we added some graphical displays and some reports of high interest topics, such as the top ten highest paid employees or top paid vendors. Your Expertise Is Needed We invite you to take a few minutes to browse through Transparent.utah.gov. Find out how much the football and basketball coaches of our states universities get paid (by far the most popular search) or see how much a certain vendor got paid by your city. Then send us your feedback and suggestions.
Share Transparent Utah with a coworker or friend. Good government requires each of us to help hold government accountable. n
The Office of the State Auditor provides Utah taxpayers and government officials with an independent assessment of financial operation, statutory compliance, and performance management for state and local government.
