Testimony before the Finance and Financial Institutions Committee (HB 420)

By Michael J. Maurer, Director, posted November 12, 2008

Good afternoon Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I am Mike Maurer, director of the Center for Transparent and Accountable Government at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions. At the request of Rep. John Adams, I have reviewed H.B. 420, sponsored by Rep. Tom Brinkman, which has passed the House unanimously. Transparency is a "good government," non-partisan issue. The best evidence of its appeal to both sides of the main ideological and political divide is USAspending.gov, an interactive database of federal contracts that was created by the Coburn-Obama bill, also known as the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. You probably recognize the name Obama, while Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is a Libertarian Republican who might be closer to Ron Paul than he is Ronald Reagan, but in any case he is not ideologically aligned with our president elect. Grover Norquist, a well known anti-tax, anti-spending activist, is aligned on this issue with Ralph Nader, the well-known consumer activist.

While transparency is not a partisan issue, it does to go the fundamental nature of representative government. It is, frankly, better for you as individuals sitting in the chairs you have right now to not be transparent. Each of you believes not only that you are a person of good faith, but also that the person next to you, of either party, is also a person of good faith. Moreover, on almost every salient issue that comes before you, you will have witnesses such as myself coming forward arguing that justice and the American way requires you to do action A, and then the next moment another person will come forward and argue that justice and the American way requires you to do the opposite action, instead of action A, action "Not A." But for all of that, your lives will actually be easier, more productive and more satisfying if you embrace concepts such as those reflected in H.B. 420. I have attached several examples of news articles and similar things, some of the positive, such as the state auditor's plan to study xbrl, a computer data format related to xml, which is what makes the Internet work, and some of them are less positive, such as a local school board that is going through all sorts of silly contortions to evade public records laws. Voters are much better than we often give them credit for, and this is your opportunity to show faith in them.

In addition to being a former reporter, I am also an attorney, and I remember when I was just starting out I had a mentor, a very successful and admired attorney who was quite aged, and he took me to dinner. I asked, "What is the most important thing about practicing law?"

He said "Get the facts." You can imagine this; I thought I was quite clever for asking such an obvious and simplistic question, and I was kind of shocked by his simplistic answer. I was kind of embarrassed. I thought he was being coy, or dismissive, or even that he was becoming feeble. I said, "Doesn't everyone do that?" He actually snorted at me.

Of course he was right. Getting the facts is hard. Any reporter knows this, any attorney knows it, anyone who attends these hearings knows it. What you have before you in H.B. 420 is, frankly, a modest effort to put some data before the voters and citizens. It's the very beginnings of performance audit data, it's a real estate database, and it's a contract and awards database. There is nothing very onerous here, nor is there anything very controversial. Moreover, while some of these things sound simple and some sense are simple, they are also hard to do and they require time to develop. You should begin this process sooner rather than later.

In an 1802 letter to his Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, President Thomas Jefferson wrote that a "simplification of the form of accounts in the treasury department and in the organization of its officers so as to bring everything to a single centre, we might hope to see the finances of the Union as clear and intelligible as a merchant's books, so that every member of Congress and every man of any mind in the union should be able to comprehend them, to investigate abuses, and consequently to control them."

These words are just as true today as they were then, and today we have the great advantage of the Internet and computer technology to make this task easier and more effective. I have attached a few articles referencing efforts around the nation to make government operating data readily available to the public. The movement is widespread and I believe irresistible, and I urge you to be leaders of it, rather than followers.

Mike Maurer is director of the Center for Transparent and
Accountable Government at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy
Solutions. He is an attorney and a former Statehouse reporter.