{"id":1623146,"date":"2022-08-26T11:51:52","date_gmt":"2022-08-26T15:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1623146"},"modified":"2022-08-26T11:51:54","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T15:51:54","slug":"nonprofit-watchdog-claims-victory-in-battle-to-make-californias-spending-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/nonprofit-watchdog-claims-victory-in-battle-to-make-californias-spending-public\/","title":{"rendered":"Nonprofit Watchdog Claims Victory in Battle to Make California\u2019s Spending Public"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fnonprofit-watchdog-claims-victory-in-battle-to-make-californias-spending-public%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1623146&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>A Chicago-based nonprofit transparency watchdog declared victory on Aug. 25 in a years-long battle to expose more than $300 billion in California government spending, making it the 50th and final state to have its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.openthebooks.com\/california-state-checkbook\/?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email\">\u201ccheckbook\u201d<\/a> made public.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike most of the other 49 states, however, California officials fought <a href=\"https:\/\/www.openthebooks.com\/\">OpenTheBooks.com<\/a> at every turn and would have succeeded in keeping government expenditures concealed from the state\u2019s taxpayers but for the\u00a0nonprofit\u2019s determination.<\/p>\n<p>At one point in the struggle, after the organization sued for the spending data, California Controller Betty Yee claimed in state court that officials couldn\u2019t provide it to OpenTheBooks.com or anybody else because the state has no central payments database.<\/p>\n<p>Yee also claimed that compiling the data would be an excessive burden on officials because the state receives volumes of paper payment documents from thousands of suppliers and vendors every year.<\/p>\n<p>At that point, OpenTheBooks.com\u2019s auditors took on the herculean task of submitting separate public records requests to each of California\u2019s 469 individual state agencies, boards, and commissions, and then compiling the data in an accessible public database.<\/p>\n<p>The group\u2019s auditors \u201caccomplished what the governor, controller, attorney general, lawmakers, a Superior Court judge, and state bureaucrats refused to do.\u201d OpenTheBooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a <a href=\"https:\/\/openthebooks.substack.com\/p\/historic-announcement-californias\">statement<\/a> upon releasing the California checkbook. \u201cWe opened the books on California\u2019s line-by-line state expenditures.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was a historic knockdown, drag-out dogfight that lasted a decade and spanned the last two California controllers. Since 2005, the state\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/redirect\/d9e11bec-bc26-4ddc-9b2e-4e335193b043?r=faen9\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">invested $1.1 billion in accounting software<\/a>, yet still couldn\u2019t publish a complete record of state spending.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Among the first revelations, the checkbook revealed that California officials paid out nearly $76 billion to more than 64,000 vendors in 2021. For the first time in the Golden State\u2019s history, every individual taxpayer with a computer and internet access can see<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Chicago-based nonprofit transparency watchdog declared victory on Aug. 25 in a years-long battle to expose more than $300 billion in California government spending, making it the 50th and final state to have its \u201ccheckbook\u201d made public. Unlike most of the other 49 states, however, California officials fought OpenTheBooks.com at every turn and would have [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":173,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1623146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/173"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1623146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1623146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1623146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1623146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}