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Eckstrom Proclaims 2009 “Year Of Transparency”

Saying that South Carolina taxpayers have “an absolute right” to access information about how the government spends their money, S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom yesterday proclaimed 2009 as the “Year of Transparency” in the Palmetto State.

He also made it clear that he was willing to go over the heads of recalcitrant bureaucrats by putting their agency spending information on line - whether they liked it or not.

“We got a lot of pushback on this,” Eckstrom said, “So we decided to bypass the agencies.”

Eckstrom convened yesterday’s meeting of editorial writers, reporters and bloggers for the ostensible purpose of handing out the state’s 2008 annual report, but it was the debate over public access to state spending that drove the discussion.

As part of that conversation, Eckstrom rolled out an updated S.C. Spending Transparency Website, part of his office’s ongoing effort to increase public access to government spending information.

“We’re trying to create a system where no one has to come crawling on their hands and knees for this information,” Eckstrom said.

The new site includes a much more detailed breakdown of state spending than anything else on the market, although it is still a work-in-progess and doesn’t include spending from South Carolina local governments and numerous other state-supported entities, like the S.C. Research Authority or our higher ed system … or the S.C. General Assembly, for that matter.

Eckstrom’s efforts to put this information online mesh with a broader effort to streamline the state’s accounting practices.

Six years ago, for example, Eckstrom said there were 74 different accounting systems being used in state government, and that “now those have been consolidated into one.”

The price tag associated with consolidation wasn’t cheap - $63 million - but Eckstrom says that “state agencies were spending far more than that” on their individual contracts, which forced his office to spend still more money extracting data from numerous different programs.

What hasn’t been expensive, though, is the process of putting this information online - which debunks arguments raised by RINO politicians and bureaucrats who are hoping to keep this information secret by inflating the price tag for disclosure.

State Sen. Larry Martin and numerous local government leaders have objected to creating an online database for all state spending on the grounds that it would be cost-prohibitive, a notion Eckstrom says is ridiculous.

“I’m embarassed to tell you how little it cost us to do this,” he says. “For local governments to object to this on the grounds it would cost too much is specious.”

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