Auditor Candidate Pledges Bold Transparency for Massachusetts

Wednesday, May 26, 2010 10:05 AM

Massachusetts Auditor candidate Kamal Jain doesn’t just like transparency – he’s staked his campaign on it. And we like those odds.

Jain is one of two Republicans in the race for the Bay State’s Auditor position and has made his objective for the state office pretty clear – put all state spending online in a easily accessible, clearly manageable and highly detailed portal. This insight – that true transparency requires data flexibility and line-item detail – is unmatched by any candidates for state office we have seen. He pledges to have a transparency portal up and running within six months of assuming office and has adopted a commonsense attitude about transparency as a platform:

“Guttenberg democratized the Bible. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car, he made it available. Wikipedia is now one of the most widely referenced resources available and taxpayers still can’t go online and simply access information on state spending? We will not only have this data available in a detailed, searchable format we will also make the data set available to any researcher who wants to use it - so they can take it, mash it, and use it to make the spending relevant to different groups of people.”

We are excited and encouraged that a candidate is not only championing this cause, but is getting a positive response from taxpayers too.  As illustrated by our Transparency in Government idea that remains one of the most popular subjects on America Speaking Out, open and accountable spending practices are not only good policy, they're widely popular as well. We’ll be following Jain’s campaign and will keep our readers posted on his ideas to bring transparency to Massachusetts.

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