Missouri Accountability Portal Expands Data Download Section

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 7:31 AM

Our friends at the Show-Me Institute shared a piece of good news yesterday:  The Missouri Accountability Portal, created by then-Gov. Matt Blunt and currently maintained by the Nixon administration, has been expanded in an area that will help interested parties analyze the data in a comprehensive form:

While MAP had readily searchable tables of employee salaries, state spending, tax revenues, and tax credits, the large databases behind those tables weren’t available for download as a whole; instead, they were exportable only in bite-sized tables. This made analyzing, say, state expenditures during the past decade impossible.

I left a voicemail; they left a voicemail. I left another voicemail. And then, on Friday, I was told that the web page was up.

That’s right, not only did the folks at MAP fulfill my request, but they thought they might as well fix this problem for everyone. Here’s the link: http://mapyourtaxes.mo.gov/MAP/Download/Default.aspx. On this page, you can download: state expenditures for the past decade, either by year or as a gigantic database; stimulus revenues and expenditures; a database of employee salaries for the past three years; and the amounts that the state has given away in tax credits during the past decade. Oh, and the spreadsheets for this year are updated each night — so you don’t get stale data.

Certainly something we'd like to see more of - both in terms of responsiveness on the part of government and in terms of data availability.

Tags: Transparency MO | Comments (4)

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