New York’s City Spending Goes Online (See NYC Spend Poorly Each Day)

Center for Fiscal Accountability ^ | 7/27/10 | Renae Bartusch

[Andrea19]

The New York City Comptroller has unveiled a new transparency website that just went live earlier this month. CheckbookNYC looks exactly like what the URL hints at—a checkbook. Visitors to the site can look up expenditures by department, category, transaction, payee, or contact. The database is updated everyday and looks like what your checkbook might look like if you wrote over $60 billion dollars worth of checks a year.

At first glance, this site seems like a great tool to get information on detailed state spending but there are limitations. There isn’t a purpose explanation offered for transactions and payroll information is aggregated. New York City Comptroller John Liu defends this downside by saying “It’s not just about satiating people’s curiosity. It is also about sending a very strong message to everybody in city government—myself included—that the public will be able to scrutinize, very carefully, how we’re spending their money...”

[Andrea19]

The new comptroller probably is hoping to run against Mayor-for-Life Bloomberg someday.

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