| Join Our List
|
|
|
|
Dear Sacha,
It
is very easy to miss the forest for the trees. No surprise
there. If there weren't any truth to the saying then it wouldn't
so well known and popular. Generally transparency is considered
one issue and government spending, vis-a-vis government waste, is
considered another. However, as you'll see in this week's
newsletter, the one can very directly influence the other.
|
"Could transparency cut down on government waste?"
|
|
Is transparency a means or an end?
Brian
Friel asks the question, "Could transparency cut down on government
waste?" Since the ElectronicTender System is aimed at reducing
government spending and I have often espoused the virtues of greater
transparency, this is a very interesting question for me.
Assuming it is possible for transparency to reduce government waste,
how would this be accomplished?
Friel takes the Katy Independent
School District in Texas as an example. He explains that "the
Katy school district posts its monthly check registers online. Local
citizens can view the amount of every check written by the district, as
well as every check recipient." Other school districts in Texas
have similar information available online. Why shouldn't such
transparency become the norm for federal agencies?
Grover
Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, put the situation into
familiar terms: "People are used to going online and seeing their AmEx
accounts. They're used to checking their UPS and FedEx material
traveling across the country. They can see every check they write at
their bank. If people can track their own expenditures online,
then why can't the government do the same? I think at the federal
level and the state level in the next 10 years, this is inevitable."
However, a little information can be worse than no information. Friel uses the example of Contract Transaction #16093287 from USAspending.gov.
USAspending.gov addresses the requirements of the Federal Funding
Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Transparency Act), which
requires a single searchable website accessible by the public, for
free, that includes a variety of information for each Federal
award. The information provided by the website tells us that the
General Services Administration purchased pickup trucks from the Ford
Motor Company. The contract was signed on January 17, 2008 for
the amount of $2,164,964.
The information that we don't have,
Friel points out, is how many trucks the GSA purchased. If the
GSA bought 100 trucks (at $21,649 per truck) this contract would have
been a good deal for the GSA. If they bought only 50 trucks
(which would then average $43,298 per truck) then the deal looks
considerably different.
|
|
| We're
all aware that information can be deceptive. This is as true of a
news story as it is of how much money was spent and where. The
Katy Independent School District in Texas spent $22,342.49 at
pizzerias. The citizens who have children in that school district
may be content with that information. Or they may take the next
responsible step and ask to what use all that pizza was put, rather
than assume this money was well spent. Just because the
government makes information available does not absolve its citizens of
their responsibility. It's always essential to know all the
information as well as its context.
Sincerely,
Sacha Hartmann
YSER Inc.
|
|
|
