Tell Me More – How to improve budget transparency
Recommendations for improving how the State of Illinois presents its budget to residents.
Governor Quinn should be commended for his willingness to make government spending more transparent and improving citizen review of the budget. The Illinois Accountability Portal, sunshine.illinois.gov, and the public budget comment portal are indicators of this commitment.
In the spirit of continuous improvement, we recommend additional improvements to the budget proposal presentation to make government spending and taxation clearer:
- Briefly describe the purpose of each program, grant, designated purpose. Nowhere in the official Fiscal Year 2011 budget proposal is the mission and/or purpose of the East St. Louis Financial Advisory Authority indicated, for example.
- Include more effective measures of what constitutes success for state agencies, with a focus on what they actually accomplish instead of what resources they use. Per capita spending changes, like those used for the Department of Children and Family Services, should not be considered performance metrics.
- Indicate which programs are and are not reaching their objectives. Agencies should be proud of their major accomplishments, but a full accounting of activities would include what hasn’t been achieved or is still in progress. The Program Assessment Rating Tool, used by the federal government, is a good model. It indicates which federal programs exceed expectations and which are ineffective.
- Show the number of full-time equivalent employees connected to each program within each department.
- Offer budget numbers in a downloadable spreadsheet format. Currently, the information is only available via a PDF format. We made our budget numbers available in spreadsheet format here.
- Provide copies of budgets from previous fiscal years (going back at least ten years) online at the Office of Management and Budget website. Right now, only the Fiscal Year 2011 and Fiscal Year 2010 budget books are available at http://www.state.il.us/budget/. The Institute put budget books from fiscal years 2005-2010 online.
Implementing these recommendations will enhance the ability of citizens, taxpayers, legislators, and government employees to determine priorities and understand the impact of policy decisions.