Rollout of budget transparency website lagging

Some government watchdogs believe the UNC system is rife with wasteful spending and would like to have a fiscal tool to probe complicated financial information so they could prove or disprove that contention. Lawmakers say the ability to see exactly how much is being spent, and on what, is good government.

“The main reason we care is that we know that the university is spending almost twice as much on administrators as they are on faculty members, and we know that they’re spending a lot of money that they shouldn’t be spending,” said Jenna Ashley Robinson, president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

“We know there’s a lot of waste, but we really can’t pinpoint it until we get them to open up their checkbook,” Robinson said.

In fact, the very mechanism for which Robinson and others clamor was approved by the General Assembly in 2015 when more than $800,000 was allocated to create a budget transparency website making government finances more visible to taxpayers.

The idea behind the move was to provide a user-friendly, computerized search tool that could show financial transactions from all state agencies, county and municipal governments, and local school districts. The idea is to make it as easy to examine expenditures, receipts, and recipients as it is to review a personal checkbook.

“Part of it’s out there,” said state Sen. Andrew Brock, R-Davie, who pushed for creation of the website. But it is far from completion, and still does not allow the depth and scope of examination he envisioned. He views it as a powerful accountability tool for the General Assembly to cut through agency bureaucracy, hidden funds, and other challenges.

“When they come up here asking for more money we can pull up the figures” to show exactly where money is being spent, and determine whether legislative budget writers have accurate and truthful assessments, Brock said.

The site is intended to do more than catch excessive spending. It also could identify important programs where more spending is needed, and show areas where funding could be reallocated.

Brock noted that the site was supposed to be fully functional last year, but still hasn’t met its goals. He said it was difficult to convince others that a new system would be a useful tool.

The Office of State Budget and Management was slow to get on board, he said, because the legislature, rather than the agency, created it. His understanding is that OSBM has been slow to get all the necessary budget information to the portal’s contractor, Cary-based SAS.

He said staff has told him they are working on a state Health Information Exchange and other multibillion-dollar projects, “and this is basically just a tool for budget writers, so it’s not the highest-level priority.” He said he has a meeting in coming days with SAS for an update.

Erin Matteson, assistant state budget officer, told Carolina Journal in an email about the project that it is progressing, and about $650,000 of the $814,000 appropriation has been spent.

“The budget and expenditure data currently on the site can be drilled down to the detailed expenditure account,” such as legal services, cellular phone services, etc., Matteson said. “The next level of detail, individual vendor payments, is not yet available on the site.”

Many agencies have aging accounting systems, and the state’s primary accounting system is more than 30 years old. And since state agencies use different accounting systems, making detailed data available poses many challenges, Matteson said.

Further, some payment data is legally protected, such as benefit payments and legal settlements. Those payments must be reviewed separately by agencies to ensure confidential information is not released on the site, she said.

“This process has largely been completed, and we anticipate making this information available in the future. We will also continue to add data and improve upon the site’s functionality,” Matteson said.

Brock said the concerns about being able to identify Medicaid recipients and revealing other information not lawful to release is overblown. He says the program can be set up to avoid those situations.

“Other states have already done that, so that’s ground that’s already been plowed” by SAS, Brock said.

Robinson is concerned that General Assembly members have forgotten they authorized the budget transparency website, and nobody is keeping watch on its development.

“University spending has been going up much faster than inflation, you’ve been hiring faster than the pace of the increase of students would suggest, but we really can’t figure out where all of this is going until we get at the university checkbook,” Robinson said.

Universities generally report their spending in huge blocks, which leads to “obfuscation because they don’t want people poking around in their checkbooks. They don’t want people finding where the waste is so it can be cut out,” Robinson said.

She said universities intentionally keep some positions vacant so that if they have to cut positions they don’t actually cut any jobs. She believes there are plenty other hidden pockets of money, “and they’re not going to offer it up unless they have to.”

But the budget transparency is about more than wasteful spending.  

“There are a lot of things that the university in particular is doing that a lot of taxpayers would probably be pretty upset if they knew that was what their money was going to,” Robinson said.

“A lot of activism, centers doing trainings about how people can be allies for the LGBTQ community, and the student orientation sessions that are really nothing but teaching white men they’re horrible people,” she said.