Idaho State Controller Brandon Woolf this week announced the launch of an upgrade to his state government transparency website.
The site transparent.idaho.gov first launched in 2012 to provide a portal for the public to check on government spending and salaries.
The new update expands the information accessible through the site to include expenditures down to individual contracts with specific vendors. Woolf says it also allows the public to customize data. The site includes about 10 million state transactions made each year and will cover an archive of five fiscal years, plus the current year.
The Controller’s Office is responsible for paying all of the state’s bills, totaling about $10 billion per year.
The upgrade is intended to move the website toward Woolf’s long-sought goal of making the state’s checkbook-level financial information easily available and searchable online. The site’s data is updated nightly, and has information ranging from state employee salaries to payments made on state contracts, to expenditures on travel, employee counts by agency, and more.
Woolf says he would like to eventually expand the records to also cover Idaho cities, counties, and school districts. (Idaho State Journal)
