An Open and transparent Govenrment?

The UK Government toady released their accounts. Details of all the spending they have carried out over the last 5 months since coming to power.

It shows, warts and all, all the expediture from team building days to renovations to consultancies. The threshold was set at all items of spending above £25k, but some places set the threshold as low as £100.

So, is it a good idea to publish all this data. Is it a great idea of transparency and being held to account or a masochistic stupidity? What items should be withheld, certainly details for national security, but should anything else also be held back.

And would you want you local and national governments to do the same just to prove that they are operasting in the peopls's interest?

Recently a local school district was found to have spent over $100,000 without any paper trail to explain where the money went. Not simply no oversight from the school board, but no clear idea what the money was spent on. IIRC there were items like drafts explained as being for "MISC." Often enough in direct contradiction of official policy.

A requirement of this nature for publishing expenditures seems to me as though it would be a nice protection against that sort of thing.

The question is whether it's worth the time that it would take to compile. Now, theoretically, I imagine that such a list might be able to be generated automatically via computer, if the government entities are all using the same accounting standards and software package. Which isn't likely to happen here in the US.

Add to this one of my pet desires for reform in NY would be to require our legislators to make public their income, instead of simply listing all sources of income. I really don't give a shit if, say, an Assemblyperson has a couple of rental properties in East Bumfuckistan. I do want to know, for those Legislators who are both Legislators and partners in major law firms, just how compensation for one job compares to compensation for the other.

Yes. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. As a general rule I favor openness and transparency in government operations, unless national security is at stake or individual privacy is thereby threatened. How to actually apply that policy can be difficult, but it's worth making the effort, IMHO.