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an effort to create searchable online databases for government expenditures
a tool to highlight the hypocrisy of tax hikers
Constitutional or statutory requirement to rein in growth of revenues end expenditures
a commitment made by elected officials and candidates for elected office never to raise taxes
Raising the bar for tax increases
Requiring a cool-off period for all bills with a fiscal impact
pork-barrel spending - the broken windows of the budget
TX Comptroller Combs on the Benefits of Transparency Not Only For Taxpayers, But Also for Agencies
Thursday, December 4, 2008 1:05 PM
Texas State Comptroller Susan Combs held a press conference discussing her government transparency initiatives yesterday. Take a look at Open Book Texas, which not only provides access to her spending transparency portal, but also to Texas Transparency Check-Up with lots of useful tips and links on transparency, Texas Smart Buy, a new online ordering system for agencies, and the Single Set of Books Initiative, an effort to get to a uniform financial accounting system.
In her speech, Comptroller Combs made an excellent case (talking from her own experience) for the usefulness of transparency not only from a taxpayers perspective, but also from an agency point of view:
"But besides the public having access to information, we discovered our emphasis on transparency had internal benefits in that it made our own operations transparent to us. This provided access to such detailed, centralized and easily navigable information about our budget and expenditures, which allowed us to identify redundancies, inefficiencies and other areas for improvement with a clarity that was simply not possible before.
As a result, we have already identified $8.7 million of efficiencies and savings since I took office — and that number is still growing. Of these savings, $4.8 million have already been realized, with an additional $3.8 million expected in the coming year. Here are just a couple of examples:
Toner: A closer look at our contracts for toner cartridges revealed a simpler and smarter way to consolidate purchases through one contract, rather than through multiple vendors. Getting a discount for volume saved us more than 20 percent, for a total of $73,000 on that one item.
P.O. Boxes: The mail sorter machine used by our agency needed to be replaced after many years of use. Rather than spending around $328,000 on a new mail sorter, including maintenance, we decided to purchase additional P.O. Boxes for less than $10,000 and let the existing automated machines at the Postal Service do the sorting for us.