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Oklahoma opens its books a little more

April 2nd, 2009

Oklahoma’s online effort at financial transparency started out a little clunky back in January 2008. But the site, Open Books, is making great strides in capabilities and ease of use.

The new features include the ability for citizens to:

• Search education financial data by higher and non-higher education.

• View the current fiscal year and three prior fiscal years’ (2006 – 2009) data for all state agencies.

• View expenditure and funding information at a lower level of detail for all agencies.

• View tax credits and search by taxpayer name, tax credit type or tax year.

• Search by salary type for all state agency payrolls.

• Search all vendors for the state of Oklahoma, rather than just by agency.

• Search vendors by name.

• View payments made to vendors where the total fiscal year expenditure processed through the Office of State Finance exceeds $5,000 (the previous limit was $25,000)

Every Oklahoma taxpayer ought to have an Open Books link in their browser. Or you can always use the one here on Okiedoke titled State Spending under okie resources in the right column.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 7:24 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Oklahoma opens its books a little more”

  1. Nick Baker Says:
    April 14th, 2009 at 11:38 pm

    Mike there is a danger in assuming the info provided is correct. Time doesn’t allow checking out everything. But, in the case of tax credits it is not even close.

    Two reports are provided on OpenBooks for Venture Capital tax credits. There is another report that is not on OpenBooks. Just one example 3 different reports give the following 3 numbers for the same tax credits.

    Rural Venture Capital Cos — $3,529,952 — $17,556,597 — $47,866,078

    You can see more at
    http://prowlingowl.com/OKTaxCom/OTCCoverUpBadInfo.cfm

    They may have some nice explanations. Although it is hard to imagine how that could be, but never the less if the explanations are not provide then the information is of no value. The fact remains 3 different people could each see a different report and come away with an entirely different concept. Which is right and which is wrong?

    We don’t have transparency, but rather a false sense of security.