Tracking taxpayer dollars in West Virginia is now a mouse click away, with Wednesday's launch of a new website meant to allow detailed scrutiny of most state government revenues, budgets and spending.

TransparencyWV.org unites an array of public data sources for the first time, while also posting volumes of additional information online. Spending figures for the current budget year are updated daily, and the site also provides a decade's worth of prior fiscal data.

The site responds to a report that flunked West Virginia and other states because they lacked a one-stop source for checkbook-level disclosures of government finances. 
"Like any company or business, when you receive a critique, it is always a positive to find out what can be done better," acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said at a Capitol press conference announcing the new site. "A transparent government is a responsible government, and it's what the people of our great state deserve."

Tomblin credited state Auditor Glen Gainer, who pitched the idea of a transparency site. In an interview before Wednesday's press conference, Gainer said his staff focused on the best practices recommended by the report's authors, the nonpartisan U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

"We went through what PIRG had scored the states on, and made every effort to comply with what they were expecting to see on a transparency site," Gainer said.
The site's creators also looked at the online portals for such states as Texas, Indiana and neighboring Kentucky, which scored high in the March rankings.

"In many ways we've improved upon those because we've made it, I believe, much more user friendly and in a way that provides the data much more quickly," Gainer said. "We allow more point and click and then, boom, there's the information."
A spokesman for the nonpartisan group said Wednesday that it expected to review the site, but could not immediately comment on it.

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