From State Rep. David McSweeney:
IL Senate Approves Rep. McSweeney’s Bipartisan Measure Requiring Comptroller to Maintain Online Checkbook
Springfield, IL – On a bipartisan roll call, the Illinois Senate today
approved legislation State Rep. David McSweeney (R-Barrington Hills)
sponsored to bring more transparency to how state government is
spending money.
State Sen. Tom Cullerton (D-Villa Park) sponsored HB 313 in the Senate
where it passed 58-0.
“This legislation will ensure that anyone can access a detailed
accounting of how Illinois tax dollars are being spent,” McSweeney
said.
“The goal here is to not only enhance transparency, but to make
sure the state’s financial information is easy to find and all in one
place.
“This database will be a detailed accounting for all to see
about how the State spends money.
“The high level of transparency
required in this legislation will lead to greater accountability.”
House Bill 313 directs the Illinois Comptroller to maintain a more
detailed online repository of the State’s financial transactions,
including
- expenditure amount
- dates of the expenditure
- the vendor being paid
- the agency making the paymen
- the salary of each employee, and,
- to the extent possible, graphical data.
This legislation requires by law a set of detailed data that will be
available to taxpayers to not only see how much total money is being
spent, but which individual employees and contractors are getting the
money.
Comptroller Mendoza’s office currently makes this detailed information
available to taxpayers online, but it has never been required in
statute.
Rep. McSweeney worked closely with the Comptroller’s office to ensure
the practice is codified and continues under future officeholders.
“The work Comptroller Mendoza is doing to bring more transparency to
the Comptroller’s office is important and she and I both want these
efforts to continue on into the future, which is what this legislation
is all about,” McSweeney said.
“I thank her and Sen. Cullerton for their hard work on this legislation.”
House Bill 313 passed the Illinois House on March 20th by a vote of
115-0-0. It now moves to the Governor’s desk for his signature.
The bill is not very good as written.
Any transparency bill involving data needs to have a requirement that an easy to use option be put in place to easily download the data to a spreadsheet in the xls or xlsx data format.
And as an option, the .cvs format, which can be imported into a spreadsheet.
And as another option, an accdb file that can be imported into an Access database.
As it stands now, the Comptroller could do that, but using past history as a predictor, will not do that.
The citizens need easier access to analyze large amounts of data on citizen computers.