Governor Tim Pawlenty and Minnesota Management and Budget unveiled the new “Transparency and Accountability Minnesota Project” website last month. According to the TAP-MN front page, the website “provides a powerful new way for the public to access information about state government spending. “ Governor Pawlenty himself heralded the site by saying, “Taxpayers are paying the bills and they should have the ability to easily look at the state’s checkbook.”
The TAP-MN site is a database of state expenditures with a front end that allows a user to search by vendor, spending category, source of funding and state agency as well as narrow their search by other parameters like the year of the expense.
It has its limitations. The first one is the URL. http://www.mmb.state.mn.us/tap Got that? Better bookmark it because it’s not easy to remember. Other states like Nebraska have come up with convenient URLs like http://nebraskaspending.com/ . Do you use a browser other than Microsoft Internet Explorer? Too bad, the TAP-MN website will not work for you. Also, once you get on the site, you will find that that some spending is hidden due to “privacy” issues most notably, checks issued to individuals.
Another problem is that since we do not yet have consistent transparency down to the local government level, when the state sends checks to local government, the trail goes cold for citizens interested in what local governments are doing with their state tax dollars. Some cities and counties are better than others in reporting their budgets in detail. Some do only the minimum required by law. There are other quasi-government entities with limited fiscal reporting requirements, such as “development corporations” and “port authorities.” Opacity rather than transparency is a better descriptor at those levels of government.
Digging around in the vendor reports it’s easy to see that there are probably inconsistencies in how the books are kept and how spending is reported at the lowest levels of government. For example, a professor at the U might have their membership to the American Academy of Poets paid for through a reimbursement or by directly submitting the membership invoice. The TAP database would pick up the latter method but the former? That would probably be black boxed as a payment to a private individual. Antiquated accounting methods at the beginning of the process probably don’t help TAP-MN live up to the ideal of “transparency.”
Still, for budget hawks, a consideration is that many hands make light work. When the public is given access to the information contained in the TAP-MN website, a bright light will shine in many dark corners for many different reasons. Say you own a pizza joint. You can look up your competitors as vendors on the TAPS-MN website to see if they are getting catering gigs from state government. If you are not getting them, you can ask why and perhaps prepare a competitive bid. That may disrupt a few sweetheart deals that vendors have been getting in the past but it is a big win for taxpayers, the state budget, competition and transparency in government.
