Sheryl | 
04 23rd, 2008| 
I wonder how many county and city attorneys in South Carolina have heard about this one yet from their finance directors …
I heard about S. 1144 initially through a news alert that led me to this editorial at the Charleston Post & Courier’s website from state Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom. From Mr. Eckstrom’s article, which appeared in print on April 3, 2008:
Agency compliance with any additional online data posting required by the proposed legislation could be implemented in most cases without costing the taxpayers a dime. Yet a recently released “fiscal impact statement” obtained by the General Assembly dramatically overstates the cost of implementing this proposal. Misinformed or biased “number crunching” only confuses lawmakers and gives governments an excuse not to make their spending available to the public.
Fair enough. But then Mr. Eckstrom goes on to state, by way of supporting his statement that most state agencies are already in compliance with this proposed legislation without being aware of it:
The majority of state agencies already report their finances to my office for me to process their check payments and in turn I summarize and electronically post their spending information on the state Web site. The entire program costs taxpayers nothing.
I respect Mr. Eckstrom’s position on accountability and openness in public finance, but I can’t agree with the statement that his actions “cost taxpayers nothing.” Every employee and official of the state and its political subdivisions has a job description, assigned tasks, and a finite amount of time in which to do those tasks. Adding a function — any function, regardless of how good an idea it is — within that finite amount of time costs the taxpayers something, be it overtime or the opportunity cost for whatever task was set aside to make room for the new task.
I also cannot agree with the implication that this is “simple” legislation that can be easily implemented. Certainly, scanning and rendering a simple 10-page document into a PDF is a simple enough administrative task — but most of the larger county and city statements that would be affected by this legislation would be much larger than 10 pages.
Additionally, uploading it to the web could be a difficult task, depending on the way the county’s IT department has the county’s website setup. Most IT departments restrict the people who have access to the site’s code, for one thing, which means only a handful of people at most would be expected to post all the documents for the entire county or city. Even if that restriction were not in place, uploading the documents to the web isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. It’s easy enough for me, using WordPress, to upload the full text of the bill (for example — here, in PDF), but WordPress has a one-click solution for such tasks, and not many county websites are powered by WordPress! Most have interfaces that would require some measure of technical skill — which means training, which means more opportunity and fiscal cost.
That, however, isn’t my main objection to the bill. I haven’t looked at the numbers Mr. Eckstrom references, but I do believe the costs would exceed what we’d call de minimis. For one thing, the sheer number of pages for some counties’ checking account transactions would be mindboggling.
Think of Horry County with its 1500-plus employees, each paid by check every other week (two sets of transactions). Then add the credit card transactions — a busy fleet of police cars, public works vehicles, code enforcement vehicles, all using county credit cards to purchase gas. Add the bank cards for council members and administrative staff for necessary travel. Add, too, all the transactions Procurement engages in to maintain stores of widely and frequently used items.
Now, imagine scanning each and every one of them. That would be a time-consuming task that could conceivably require additional personnel. And the resulting PDFs would be enormous — possibly technically unfeasible; the impact on the county’s website bandwidth could be significant as well.
I can’t argue with the impulse to make public expenditures publicly accessible. I think it’s a laudable goal. I simply question how much thought went into this legislation, and how much of that input came from government employees in a position to know the true costs of compliance.
