US states have been ranked on their online access to government spending data, with Texas and Kentucky top of the list. See what the rest reveals

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The Follow the Money 2012 report has this week revealed the good news that more US states are being open about their public spending by publishing their transactions on their websites. It has also exposed the states of Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Montana and Wyoming that are keeping their finances behind a password protected wall or are just not publishing at all.

A network of US Public Interest Research Groups (US PIRGs) which produced the report, revealed that 46 states now “allow residents to access checkbook-level information about government expenditures online”.

The checkbook means a digital copy of who receives state money, how much, and for what purpose. Perhaps to make sense of this ‘checkbook’ concept it’s useful to compare US and UK public finance transparency.

In the UK councils have been publishing lists of their spending over £500 for just over a year. This is mostly monthly, mostly in spreadsheets, and the data can be anything from a list of suppliers and amount paid on a particular date to much more detailed accounts of spending.

The government site Direct Gov provides a service to look up your local council’s spending data. Websites like Openly Local and Open Spending gather and are making sense of the UK council spending collectively.

There are sticky difficulties interpreting the data though: it’s often not clear if it is payment in advance and repayments will be made at a future date and it’s often not clear what a payment is for. We detailed these problems in this datablog post shortly after the first wave of local council transparency. This is not to diminish the potential of this data.

This is just the UK way.

In the US the best states are producing a checkbook tool which gives users the ability to monitor state spending in almost real-time because the data is updated nightly.

But more than that the checkbook allows users to see the exact amounts paid to the vendor, without mixing in contracts that are in the form of pre-purchase orders or term contracts.

The Follow the Money 2012 report found Texas and Kentucky to be leading examples of states who are accountable to their citizens. Kentucky lost some points in the grading as checkbook-level spending information is not downloadable, but aggregate expenditure information by department or type of goods or service was.

The value of good transparency is illustrated by some nice examples in the report.

when Minnesota began to require agencies to submit reports on the performance of subsidized projects, the reports revealed that numerous projects were receiving assistance from two or more funding sources—that is, Minnesota tax-payers were sometimes double- and triple- paying for the creation of the same jobs. After the centralized publication of those reports, the double-dipping stopped.

Here’s the key data from the report with links to all the states’ websites. Let us know what you think to the ranking and what you’d like to see in the UK.

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