Nevada Press Association The best in Nevada journalism since 1924
Nevada should be like a kid happily skipping home to show his parents a ‘B’ on his report card.
And taxpayers, reporters and other watchdogs should be like the stern parents who respond, “Yes, I’m happy too. But you know you can do better.”
The ‘B’ earned by Nevada is on U.S. Public Interest Group’s scorecard of state governments on their spending transparency.
That means it does a good job of allowing the public to go online to search for where the tax money goes.
It fits into PiRG’s category of “advancing states” in the push to make more information available.
“Advancing States, with the exception of Maryland, have checkbooks that are searchable by recipient, keyword and agency. (Maryland allows for searches using two of the three fields.) With the exception of Pennsylvania, Advancing States also allow users to download all or part of the checkbook data for offline analysis. In addition, all Advancing States follow the best practice of posting tax expenditure reports online, providing summaries of the tax revenue forgone from tax exemptions, credits and other breaks (although Virginia could improve by posting more recent data),” reads the report.
The Nevada site is open.nv.gov.
PiRG has some specific criteria for how states could improve their transparency websites, mainly by expanding the scope.
My reason for saying Nevada could do better, though, has more to do with transparency throughout the whole process. For one thing, we should see the budget requests made by agencies before they’re massaged by the governor’s office.
And the spending transparency needs to pass down to local governments, as well. Some do a good job, but others aren’t following state law on posting their spending and revenue quarterly.
And despite a commendable commitment to making information accessible when they want to release it, there are plenty of other places where Nevada’s governments wouldn’t score well on transparency.
Still, we’ll take a B where we can get it.