California Won’t Release Its Spending Records: So Much For Open and Transparent Government

Hotair ^ | 12/19/2019 | Jazz Shaw

[SeekAndFind]

Are you already familiar with OpenTheBooks.com? It’s a nonpartisan private group dedicated to transparency in government spending. For the past six years, they have been requesting and publishing the spending records of all fifty states so taxpayers can be made aware of where their money is going. Well… make that 49 states. The lone holdout is California which has consistently failed to turn over the records. Their excuse? Apparently, the Golden State isn’t sure where all the money goes. (Free Beacon)

California is the only state in the country that has refused to reveal public spending records to a government watchdog, prompting threats of legal action.

OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit dedicated to government transparency, said the Golden State is the lone holdout since it began sending public record inquiries to state governments in 2013. Governments in 49 states have complied with requests for itemized accounts of taxpayer funds sent to vendors and public sector employees. California’s state government, however, has so far failed to provide the details of the 49 million individual payments it makes each year using taxpayer dollars, saying it is unable to track and document its activities.

“Their excuse is that they can’t locate the records—that their system doesn’t allow the controller after she makes the payment to track the payment,” OpenTheBooks.com founder Adam Andrzejewski told the Washington Free Beacon.

The group is preparing to go to court and sue California in an effort to get them to release their records. This wouldn’t be the first time they’ve had to go this route. They met similar resistance from Wyoming and Illinois, among others. In the end, all the other states wound up collecting and releasing the spending records.

The excuse being provided by Betty Yee, the California State Controller, should be alarming to everyone in the state who pays taxes. Her office is claiming that they don’t have the ability to track the money being paid to vendors and public sector employees. This really only leaves two possibilities and neither of them are good. Either they’re hiding this information from the public intentionally or they honestly don’t have a way to track the money.

If California is unable to keep records of where these tens of millions of payments go each year, how do they audit the system and ensure that nobody is defrauding the state? How do they investigate possible embezzlement or corruption? And even in the miraculous event that none of that is going on, the taxpayers still deserve to know who is getting their money and what it’s being spent on.

Yee claims she’s been doing a fine job and that her office identified $4.35 billion in “waste, abuse, and mismanagement” during her tenure. But as the Free Beacon points out, that’s sort of a drop in the bucket compared to the $1.5 trillion that passed through her office during the same period. Surely this in violation of the state’s transparency laws.

The report goes on to point out another area where money seems to be disappearing into the void. The state’s pension program, CalPERS, is currently $60B in the hole for the current fiscal year. A separate watchdog group, Transparent California, has attempted to get a list of disability and retirement payments from the program so that possible cases of fraud could be identified. CalPERS refused, citing privacy concerns and a judge upheld their decision.

California has the largest economy in the country. (And is among the ten biggest economies in the world.) But they somehow can’t keep track of all the money they are spending? Something smells fishy here and it’s not one of their famous seafood restaurants.

[BBQToadRibs]

Convenient excuse to hide how deep in the hole you are.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Shocked I tell you.

[fruser1]

Money goes to the same old commie cronies as usual.

[fhayek]

Obstruction of the Taxpayer!!

[olesigh]

that response was BS I was a business administrator in the state and i can tell you any auditor can find the source of the authorization, the payee and the person responsible to writing the check in 3-5 days on almost any amount of money.

[eyeamok]

saying it is unable to track and document its activities.

Hey US Treasury Department, California is LAUNDERING MONEY and Committing Wire Fraud, Bank Fraud, and a whole host of Financial crimes, shouldn’t you be ARRESTING them and Seizing their Assets???

[blueunicorn6]

The Governor claimed they had a $7,000,000,000 surplus.

Think of how many homeless they could shelter with that money.

Gavin Newsom is a heartless Scrooge.

[olesigh]

the state of cal is in the black on day-to-day. but the state pension funds are encumbered for over 249 billion in the long-term over what is budgeted, due to false projections about the pension fund investments. Also bonds and boondoggles like the HS rail to nowhere is like a mortgage payment which is way over committed.

[Surrounded_too]

I M P E A C H

[timestax]

Mucho FREE $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to California gubmint "workers" . HooBoy .

[blueunicorn6]

California is taxing all of us.

The Democrat politicians in California told the Democrat Base that they could steal and the Democrat politicians would see that the thieves wouldn’t be punished.

The Democrat Base started stealing.

The stores aren’t just going to eat that loss.

They raise their prices.

And they can’t just raise their prices only in California, so we all get to pay money to the Democrat thieves in California.

The California Democrat politicians thank you for providing benefits to the California Democrat voters!

They didn’t even have to bother with writing a new tax law.

Aren’t they generous with your money?

[Don Corleone]

California has been bankrupt and way over its head for at least forty years. If the US govt wasn’t sending them tons of money they would have collapsed a generation ago. Marxism stinks!

[Mariner]

This article is essentially fake news. CA has not made a conscious choice here.

Not that I don’t appreciate their sentiment.

But the fact is the State’s new, mammoth and centralized Accounting program just doesn’t work. And CA has no means by which to provide the data. They really, and truly, do not know how much is being spent, nor who is receiving it.

Not that they ever cared.

I posted an article here within the last week that talks about FI$CAL. Hunt it up if you’re interested.

[Mariner]

” If the US govt wasn’t sending them tons of money they would have collapsed a generation ago. “

Nothing like exposing your ignorance in front of 10,000 people.

Go ahead, double down. We’ll watch.

[Mariner]

“I was a business administrator in the state”

Before, or after FI$CAL, the new centralized accounting program?

It might be possible to do an office-by-office paper audit over 10 years or so...

[olesigh]

EI don’t recall the name of our system. It was mainframes into the dept of finance. If finance couldn’t find something they would often call and ask a question we usually had to answer ASAP. That’s how, two months win the job, i fired my business manger who was making calls to Egypt omg the state phone line.

I was not a pro business person, but always a good budget manager. My senior actt officer walked on water and we directed business offices in 12 locations.

[Karl Spooner]

See how easy it is when they don't have to follow their own laws? They get rewarded in this crooked world.

California’s government credit score gets upgraded by another Wall Street firm It's the first California upgrade by Moody's in five years.

[hal ogen]

yet another reason to avoid living (or visiting) the former “golden” state. In is the “human dung, human debris and drug needle” state.

[Sergio]

bkmk