There’s a problem with Colorado’s online checkbook.
The transparency website is supposed to let Colorado residents log on and track how the state government is spending their money in real time, down to every last paperclip and GPS collar used to track wolves on the West Slope, for instance.
In some cases, it's working. One entry shows a $32,000 payment to Vectronic Aerospace Inc. last year for those wolf tracking collars.
But KUNC News has discovered more than 16,000 checkbook entries in the last year that are missing the names of the people or businesses who got the taxpayer money listed there. Instead, there are generic codes entered in the spaces where those vendors' names are supposed to be.
The missing data prevents the public from following where hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government spending is going. A review by KUNC News found that entries missing specific vendor names account for more than $600 million in government spending in the last fiscal year alone.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are now raising concerns about the issue, which appears to violate a law they passed less than two years ago requiring more transparency in the online checkbook. And government officials tell KUNC they're researching a way to fix it.
“This is not right,” State Sen. Janice Rich, R-Grand Junction, said Monday after KUNC News asked her to take the checkbook website for a test drive to review recent payments from the legislature.
While the checkbook showed complete spending data in some cases, including several records of checks the state wrote to lawmakers for mileage reimbursements, Rich quickly found several entries missing the names of the people or companies who got the checks.
The missing recipient names are most common in a category of government spending called “professional services,” which is a broad category including contractors the government hires for everything from legal services to refinishing tables.
“And here's another (entry), for $125,000, and doesn't tell you who that (check went to)," she said. “It tells you nothing. How much simpler could it be to just ask the government to be transparent? I just can't believe bureaucracy continues to hide where it’s spending money.”
The missing entries can be found across government agencies, from the Secretary of State’s Office to the Governor’s Office.
Transparency advocates say the missing data blocks the public’s ability to use the checkbook to hold the government accountable for the spending.
“It makes it harder to trust what you’re seeing," Jeff Roberts, head of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said Tuesday. “It's not gonna be useful if the information is inputted incorrectly or it's just not displaying the right way.”
The missing data also appears to violate a bipartisan transparency law the legislature passed unanimously in 2022 that requires the state to display all of the specific vendor names in the checkbook with few exceptions.
Sen. Rich led the effort to pass the bill.
“Without that information (in the checkbook), this website is useless,” she told KUNC in 2022- when she first introduced that bill. “Let’s let constituents know where that money is going. This is taxpayer money. ”
She now says she’s disappointed the new law isn’t having the effect it was supposed to.
An evolving explanation
So, why is data missing from the checkbook? The website is managed by Colorado’s Department of Personnel and Administration. When KUNC News first asked about the missing vendor names last week, spokesperson Doug Platt said the checkbook was “not malfunctioning.”
He raised the possibility that individual government departments might not be entering that information in their accounting system before the checkbook does a data sweep each week to import the financial data.
But Natalie Castle, the director of the Legislative Council Staff at the Capitol, said the vendor name is one of the first things government departments enter in their accounting systems when they make payments.
She confirmed with KUNC that her department was entering the names and not requesting any redactions, which is only allowed under state law if the information would “hurt the public interest” or violate health privacy laws.
She used her accounting software to go through her departments’ recent payment entries and could quickly find who got the checks. They included payments to Capitol tour guides, an auditing firm, and a facilitator for the Colorado River Drought Task Force.
But the names of those vendors didn't show up in the public version of the website, and Castle didn’t know why.
“It’s very rare I don’t see a vendor name listed,” she said of the reports in her accounting software. “Transparency is one of our biggest values.”
KUNC also asked the governor’s office about all of the checkbook entries in its department missing the names of people who got the money.
The next day, after Governor’s Office officials said they started looking into it, the Department of Personnel and Administration reached back out to KUNC and said it did “a little more digging.”
The office discovered a new explanation for the missing data.
Adrian Schulte, another spokesperson for the state personnel department, said it was a software configuration issue. He said individual government departments are entering the data correctly. The checkbook website itself just isn’t programmed to display it.
Schulte emailed a statement from the Office of the State Controller.
“We will make the necessary changes in the configuration of the (online checkbook) system so that the vendors will be listed for entries,” the statement said.
Transparency at your fingertips
Back at the state Capitol, State Rep. Judy Amabile, D-Boulder, said she was disappointed after KUNC showed her the missing checkbook data. Amabile co-sponsored the bill requiring more transparency in the checkbook.
“This is definitely not what we had in mind,” she said after she saw the number of missing vendor names.
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She said she hoped the problem could be fixed soon.
“So that people understand where the money is going,” she said. “And so that if somebody who's receiving money that maybe shouldn't be, if there's some kind of corruption or some kind of, you know, fraud or bad actors, that we should know that.”
Jeff Roberts, the head of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said the checkbook could also be used to quickly review spending information that might otherwise take days to get through an open records request.
“It's transparency at your fingertips, that's what it's supposed to be,” he said. “So you don't have to file a records request, you don't have to wait for that information. It's just there. And that's what makes it useful. But if the categories are not displaying properly, or the information was not entered properly, it's very difficult to trust what you're seeing.”
KUNC News first discovered the missing vendor names this month while trying to use the checkbook to determine how much the legislature had spent on lawyers to defend its secret ballot system in court. Searches for the law firms in the checkbook didn’t reveal any payments.
But when KUNC got the invoices from the law firms through an open records request three days later, the payment amounts matched recent entries in the checkbook. The checkbook just didn’t say who got the money.
Colorado's online checkbook was created in 2009. The legislature requires it to be updated every five days. Access it here.
