See Through Ny Posts Local Employee Compensation Information

Thursday, August 26, 2010 4:47 PM by Lauren Forbes

 Our friends at the Empire Center, who run Seethroughny.com ,  have  published the salaries of over 186,000 of New York's county, city, town and village government employees  on their portal . Seethroughny.com  is a great resource for New York taxpayers to track their tax dollars at a mouse click.  The information posted today allows interested taxpayers to see exactly how their tax dollars are being spent on New York state employee salaries and their pensions, an exploding portion of the cost of government. This is great news in the wake of other stories in other states where public scrutiny has prompted robust discussion on the exorbitant compensation of some public employees.

As  state spending continues  to skyrocket and the state dips into the red, the demand for transparency  is just one of the important antidotes for prolfigate spending. However, New York has yet to create a state-sponsored site. As more websites pop up  across the country, states are witnessing a mounting desire for spending transparency - not just at the state level but at the local level too. In 2010, both Arizona and New Mexico jumped on the bandwagon, passing spending transparency bills. Since 2007 there have been fourteen executive orders issued to create transparency portals in spending  and over 31 bills have passed to this effect, resulting in 31 states with spending transparency portals.  Although we are still far from full disclosure, the websites created to provide taxpayers with a chance to see how their money is being spent  provide us with a good start and foundation to hopefully lay more concrete groundwork towards full transparency.

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