Nonprofit Watchdog Claims Victory in Battle to Make California’s Spending Public

A Chicago-based nonprofit transparency watchdog declared victory on Aug. 25 in a years-long battle to expose more than $300 billion in California government spending, making it the 50th and final state to have its “checkbook” made public.

Unlike most of the other 49 states, however, California officials fought OpenTheBooks.com at every turn and would have succeeded in keeping government expenditures concealed from the state’s taxpayers but for the nonprofit’s determination.

At one point in the struggle, after the organization sued for the spending data, California Controller Betty Yee claimed in state court that officials couldn’t provide it to OpenTheBooks.com or anybody else because the state has no central payments database.

Yee also claimed that compiling the data would be an excessive burden on officials because the state receives volumes of paper payment documents from thousands of suppliers and vendors every year.

At that point, OpenTheBooks.com’s auditors took on the herculean task of submitting separate public records requests to each of California’s 469 individual state agencies, boards, and commissions, and then compiling the data in an accessible public database.

The group’s auditors “accomplished what the governor, controller, attorney general, lawmakers, a Superior Court judge, and state bureaucrats refused to do.” OpenTheBooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement upon releasing the California checkbook. “We opened the books on California’s line-by-line state expenditures.

“It was a historic knockdown, drag-out dogfight that lasted a decade and spanned the last two California controllers. Since 2005, the state invested $1.1 billion in accounting software, yet still couldn’t publish a complete record of state spending.”

Among the first revelations, the checkbook revealed that California officials paid out nearly $76 billion to more than 64,000 vendors in 2021. For the first time in the Golden State’s history, every individual taxpayer with a computer and internet access can see

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