My Story: Trying to get the data
As a long-time political activist, one of the most common disagreements I have seen among people is around taxation and spending. Many well-intentioned people argue that taxes are too high. Others argue that some government programs are not adequately funded, and that taxes ought to be raised rather than lowered. In the end, most reasonable people want what is best for the most people, yet they got sucked into arguing about portions of government spending without an understanding of total spending, and how much of total spending truly goes to a given program. Early on I learned that most people — be they for cutting taxes or raising them — did not understand how much total spending was. All they heard was about “the budget”, and some occasional references to “off budget” spending.
I said to myself, and to anyone who would listen, that there is no reason to wonder about these things; the data is available. In fact, it’s public information. Or so I thought. Over the past 2 years I have spent countless hours reading through thousands of pages of audit documents, spending summaries and budget proposals, only to realize that not only do the politicians not want to talk about total spending, they don’t want to discuss the details of even the official budget.
Yes, summaries, and even department-level breakdowns are available, but only at a very high level, and described in ways which make no sense to anyone — most likely not even those who voted on the budget. There are audited financial reports, which are more helpful, but they, too, do not contain any details. After numerous written letters, emails, phone calls and visits to the Office of the State Comptroller (”OSC”), I had little to show for it. I would up with more data which had more different numbers in them. Nowhere was there a place where I could find detailed breakdowns of total spending, and even acknowledgments of total spending were relegated to occasional pages buried deep within 200-plus page long audit reports.
Public records law allows the state government to charge a “reasonable” fee for data requests, and is a even more vague about reasonable delivery times. In October of 2008 I asked the OSC for the transaction level details for spending which added up to the audited total spending amount. Their response at that time was an estimate which said the charge would be $6,000 and it would take them until at least January of 2009 to provide the data. While it was a great deal of money, I was willing to come up with the money somehow if it was going to be useful data. After several exchanges of emails and phone calls, wherein my requests for clarification of what, exactly, $6,000 would get me, and several months later…I had nothing more than unanswered questions and excuses stating that they [OSC] were “really busy”.
It was at that point I decided to run for State Auditor and to begin the process of creating a citizen portal for this and other information, as the state government refuses to do so and does not view it as a priority. The people WILL NOT pay to access information about how their tax dollars are being spent, not on my watch.
Tags: Auditor, Budget, Citizen Portal, Kamal Jain, MassTransparency.com, Off Budget, Office of the State Comptroller, Taxes
