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The Arkansas Transparency Project

The Arkansas Financial Transparency Project National Association of State Controllers, Auditors & Treasurers August 14, 2012. The Arkansas Transparency Project. What it’s not:. What is the Arkansas Financial Transparency Project?. Act 303 of 2011 created the Project

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The Arkansas Transparency Project

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  1. The Arkansas FinancialTransparency ProjectNational Association of State Controllers, Auditors & TreasurersAugust 14, 2012

  2. The Arkansas Transparency Project What it’s not:

  3. What is the Arkansas Financial Transparency Project? • Act 303 of 2011 created the Project • Act 1163 of 2011 created a separate project for Arkansas’ publicly supported institutions of higher education. • The website has been live since July, 2012. • Act 303 specified 6 types of transactions: • Expenditures • Payments to Cities and Counties • Revenues • Bonded Indebtedness • Contracts • Employee Compensation *There is no single repository for the requested information

  4. Technical Considerations FIREWALL AASIS FIREWALL Internet Other data sources Other agency databases Data Warehouse Data is fed into a data warehouse managed by the AASIS Service Center. It is aggregated and/or summarized appropriately before publication on the internet. Excel Wide variety of browsers (including SmartPhones and tablets) someone’sdesk

  5. End User Design Considerations • End users are not accountants. • End users may not understand Arkansas State Government. • End users have a wide variety of skill levels. • End users have a wide variety of technical equipment. We strive to make this site simple to use, understandable, and full of meaningful information.

  6. What are the challenges to the Arkansas Financial Transparency Project? • Moving large chunks of data daily. • Helping state agencies understand what their transactions look like on the Internet. • Excluding data that is not required by this law, such as data from colleges and universities. • Other legal requirements such as FERPA, HIPAA and FOI.

  7. Numerous “helps” for constituents Each transaction type defined by Act 303 has its own search area.

  8. Type any word in the Smart Search box to locate People, Agencies or Vendors that contain that word in the title. Choose one of the results for further information.

  9. This information is not required by law, but was added to create a one-stop transparency site. Agencies are required to link to this site.

  10. Expenditures

  11. Fully Downloadable

  12. Download to Excel Click to find further details. Context Sensitive Help Click any tab to get a Top 10 list and begin to drill down to full details.

  13. This button eliminated a significant number of FOI requests.

  14. PDF copies of contracts are fully downloadable. We provide capital improvement contracts that are >$20,000 and other contracts that are >$25,000

  15. How is Transparency.Arkansas.gov different from most other states? • We have a “mobile-enabled” site. • Most data is reported on a daily basis. • P-Card transactions are reported as an expenditure at the merchant level. • We show where the card was used • We do not show the payment to the bank

  16. What are our Lessons Learned? • Be sure your data is clean and adheres to standards. • Vendor master data • Personnel data • Data from “feeder” systems • Inform & train employees at al levels. • Agencies must understand this is their data. We just report it. • Make good plans, push to completion and be sure everyone is working from the same plan. • We experienced unexpected benefits as well as unexpected consequences.

  17. Where are we today? Arkansas.Transparency.gov has been visited by more than 25,000 unique visitors from 24 different countries

  18. Where are we today? Arkansas.Transparency.gov has been visited from 49 states.

  19. Where are we today? Visitors are coming from a wide variety of networks.

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