Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't true. Like all other governments, California has no choice but to publish financial statements. You can find the rollups here: https://www.sco.ca.gov/ard_state_rpts.html. If you want the salary of every single public employee working in San Francisco, go here: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/san-francisco/?pa....

I'm perfectly happy to be outraged about some of this. Why does the top earning deputy sheriff earn three times in overtime his regular salary, for instance? I have a hard time believing he seriously put in 160 hours a week of work that deserves compensation. But there is no need to lie about it. They have no obligation to show you the literal checkbooks of each official with the power to withdraw from a public fund without charging for it, but that isn't the same thing as "hiding spending." You can view the most recently published comprehensive annual financial report here: https://www.sco.ca.gov/Files-ARD/CAFR/cafr19web.pdf. You can search the record of disbursements from public contracts here: https://suppliers.fiscal.ca.gov/psc/psfpd1/SUPPLIER/ERP/c/ZZ....

I'd like to know why this writer feels this isn't good enough.

Did you try clicking on your links?

For example, I clicked on: https://suppliers.fiscal.ca.gov/psc/psfpd1/SUPPLIER/ERP/c/ZZ... (your last link) and got this:

    You must have cookies enabled in order to sign in to your PeopleSoft application.

    Return to Sign In with cookies enabled.If your attempt fails, please contact your System Administrator.

Not really "good enough", is it?

And your "comprehensive annual fiscal report" that you're touting is for... the year ended in June 2019 (2.5 years ago). How is that useful?

Not sure what to tell you. The link worked fine for me and I don't have a login. As the sibling said, the audited financial statements take a while to complete. But budgets and financial statements and reconciliations between them are public, have to be by law, and you're also free to sit in on the legislative sessions when the budgets are approved. None of this is "easy" but I don't know what people honestly expect. They can't just open up the agency ERPs to anyone without an account, for obvious reasons.

I see this entire comment didn't go over well. People love to shit on governments. I used to be a budget officer in the US Army, in charge of the 1st Cav's efforst to digitize all records at the time the DoD was attempting to produce the first GAAP-compliant auditable financial statements ever in its history. We were digging out paper receipts from filing cabinets in rooms people had forgotten existed to upload into the SAP ERP, an extremely time-intensive and error-prone process, at the same time the sequester was going on and all the civilian staff had been furloughed, and half the headquarters was deployed to Afghanistan in the middle of this.

This is actually hard. Governments are held to much higher transparency and accountability standards than private companies, all while constantly having their own budgets cut and staff reduced, with no investment in automation or interoperability between disparate information systems and sources of truth.

People just expect this to be magic and free for some reason.

That's the most recent audited report. Auditing the state's entire financial report takes a long time. The report for year ended June 2020 should be published later this month (scheduled for December 22), according to the California State Auditor: https://www.auditor.ca.gov/bsa/aip

OK, I'll buy that. But why is the first link hidden behind a login? https://suppliers.fiscal.ca.gov/

That I cannot answer (not sure where that link comes from, maybe nonameiguess can tell you). Looks like suppliers.fiscal.ca.gov is a externet location for vendors that do business the state, not a public website.

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