Government Spending at Taxpayers’ Fingertips
Case Study
Checkbook NYC 2.0 provides unprecedented access to track how the government of New York City
spends its $70 billion annual budget.
Client Overview
The New York City Comptroller, an independently
elected official, is the Chief Financial Officer of
the City of New York. The mission of the Office
is to ensure the financial health of New York
City by advising the Mayor, the City Council, and
the public of the City’s financial condition. The
New York City Comptroller’s Office collaborated
with REI Systems (REI) to develop Checkbook
NYC--the best financial transparency website for
governments in the country.
Challenge
New York City’s path to top-flight transparency
began after the City’s near-bankruptcy in 1975.
To avoid similar crises in the future, the City
implemented a centralized accounting system for
its 100+ agencies.
Nearly four decades later, in July 2010, using data from its centralized accounting system, New York City
introduced a beta version of Checkbook NYC. Checkbook posted online all City expenditures and was
automatically updated on a daily basis.
While feedback on Checkbook NYC was overwhelmingly positive, the City was looking to build on its initial
success and expand beyond large data sets displayed in a tabular format. Simply stated, the City needed a
solution that would make its vast amount of financial information easier for taxpayers to understand.
The competitive Big Apple spirit led to another ambitious challenge: making New York the most fiscally
transparent City in the United States.
Developed by:
CheckbookNYC.com
Solution
The New York City Comptroller’s Office selected REI to help develop Checkbook NYC 2.0 because the
company had a strong track-record of developing government transparency websites, including USA Spending
and IT Dashboard.
Following months of work and an investment that exceeded $2 million, Checkbook NYC 2.0 was launched in
January 2013.
The new Checkbook NYC 2.0 website uses an intuitive dashboard layout that combines graphs and user-friendly
tables with up-to-date information on New York City’s spending, contracts, and payroll.
Checkbook NYC 2.0 is built in Drupal, an open-source platform. The website’s data warehouse, which is updated
daily, contains more than 50 million financial transactions and is growing at a rate of approximately two million
transactions per month.
Results
A comprehensive national study, conducted by the United States Public
Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG), titled “Transparency in City Spending:
Rating the Availability of Online Government Data in America’s Largest Cities,”
ranked New York City’s Checkbook NYC transparency website in the top spot
out of 30 cities.
“In the four years we’ve published evaluations of government-spending
transparency, we haven’t seen any site with this much capacity to follow the
tax dollars. I doubt any Fortune 500 company keeps track of its own spending
as comprehensively, much less as openly, as New York City. We look forward to
future improvements in disclosing economic-development subsidies and the
full text of contracts.”
– Phineas Baxandall, Ph.D., Senior Analyst and Program Director for Tax and
Budget Policy at U.S. PIRG
Next Step: Open Source
Checkbook NYC is an open source technology. New York City welcomes other state and local governments who
are evaluating and deploying Checkbook – and welcomes their private-sector partners in those deployments –
to join in maintaining and developing Checkbook NYC as a multi-stakeholder open source project.
Developed by:
CheckbookNYC.com