Colorado started fixing it’s online checkbook days after KUNC News revealed late last month the transparency tool was missing thousands of lines of data showing how the state government spent more than $600 million.
State officials called tech support in the governor’s office and recently added to the checkbook the names of more than 16,000 businesses and people who got taxpayer money in recent years.
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The update broadens the public's ability to track individual government payments, ranging from an $18,365 check to a tourism promotion company in Australia to a $10,058 payment to a Denver law firm a state representative used last fall to defend a secret ballot system in court.
The State Controller’s Office said a software configuration issue was hiding that spending data in the checkbook across all state agencies.
Transparency advocates said the missing data hurt the public’s ability to use the website to follow the money and hold the government accountable.
“It makes it harder to trust what you’re seeing," Jeff Roberts, head of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said last month. “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 appeared 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.
Not all of the missing vendor names had been revealed as of Monday afternoon. KUNC still found hundreds of entries in the checkbook missing the names of people or companies who got taxpayer funds.
The expenses lacking vendor names range from out-of-state travel to IT services.
Adrian Schulte, a spokesperson for the Department of Personnel and Administration, said Friday in an email the effort to update the checkbook and display missing vendor names is ongoing.
“The Office of the State Controller continues to work with stakeholders across all state agencies and the legislature to ensure all these vendors can be displayed as per statute,” he said.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle raised concerns about the missing vendor names when KUNC News had them take a test drive of the online checkbook on Jan. 22.
“How much simpler could it be to just ask the government to be transparent?,” State Sen. Janice Rich said after KUNC showed her several purchases in the legislature’s portion of the checkbook that were missing the names of who got the money. “I just can't believe bureaucracy continues to hide where it’s spending money.”
Rich said the checkbook was “useless” without the names of the vendors receiving money.
The missing recipient names were 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.
After hearing Monday about the state’s efforts to fix the checkbook, Rich said it would help build public trust.
“There’s a lot of distrust in government these days, and being more transparent is certainly a good thing,” she said. “Everything that the state does should be transparent to the people that actually pay the taxes.”
Schulte said the state has taken several steps since 2022 to make the online checkbook more user-friendly.
“With limited resources and close to a million transactions a year, this can be challenging,” he said. “We will continue to make fixes and adjustments as they are identified and will continue working with the controller community to ensure we are providing accurate, timely information to the public. Our desire is to be as transparent as possible so Coloradans know where their tax dollars are being spent.”
This isn't the first time Colorado has had issues with the online checkbook. In 2019, KUNC discovered the checkbook wasn't being updated every five days as required by state law.
Officials said at the time the lack of updates was due to a lack of state funding to maintain the checkbook.
