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LA Controller Website Opens City's Checkbook To Public Scrutiny

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Taxpayers in the city of Los Angeles can now see how officials are spending their hard-earned money.

KNX 1070's Jon Baird reports ControlPanelLA will allow people to sort through billions of dollars of city transactions with the click of a mouse.

LA Controller Website Opens City's Checkbook To Public Scrutiny

City Controller Ron Galperin said he launched the new website detailing billions of dollars in official transactions — including data on nearly 1,000 revenue sources, 600 expenditure accounts and bi-weekly payroll for nearly 50,000 city employees — in the interest of promoting government transparency.

"Knowledge is power, and this initiative is providing both to the people of Los Angeles," Galperin said.

The data provided on ControlPanelLA includes information about revenues, expenditures and appropriations dating back to July 2011, when the city launched its current financial management system.

Galperin, however,  added that some proprietary information will not be listed on the site for security reasons.

The website also offers users an interactive application called CheckbookLA, which lets users search tens of thousands of payments to external vendors by department, vendor name, or expenditure type.

Both ControlPanelLA and CheckbookLA were developed in partnership with the City's Information Technology Agency (ITA) and Socrata Inc., a Seattle-based cloud software company that has launched open data services for the federal government, counties and cities across the United States, as well as for organizations including the World Bank and Medicare.

Mayor Eric Garcetti said ControlPanelLA will set the new standard for public agencies nationwide.

"We hope it will be the example for the country in what open, transparent government looks like, and what data can do to improve people's lives," he said.

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