Mike Beebe (D) signed the bill into law on March 17. The "Arkansas Financial Transparency Act" was passed by the legislature in March 2011 Gov. He also attempted to have a “post the finances” ballot initiative created in California in 2003.Īlaska started publishing parts of its checkbook register in early 2008. Mozena made “post the finances” a major plank in his 2001 campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles, his 2004 run for mayor of Carson, California, and his runs for councilmember of Carson in 20. On this website, Mozena calls for all government departments and agencies to post their finances to their respective websites every day, in the form of a simple online checkbook. In California, small-businessman and community activist Steve Mozena started promoting his idea for what he called “post the finances” in 1999. A reasonable goal for transparency advocates is online posting of enough information (check number, payee, date, dollar amount and purpose) to facilitate asking specific questions without inviting abuses or defeating the goals of citizen participation.Ī cautionary note on online check registers (not an objection in principle) is that they may focus public attention on small, specific expenses, which are usually easy to understand, but do little to illuminate complex decisions that drive the bulk of every district’s total budget costs. They need not be accepted as excuses for publishing nothing, nor should they be dismissed quickly. Minimizing these problems may require either human judgment on a case-by-case basis or software programming that automatically blanks out some information within sensitive line-item categories. These should be available on request but not necessarily published automatically. For example, tracking money flows in a medium-sized Pennsylvania school district requires approximately 15,000 distinct accounting codes.
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