Announces series of workshops open to press and the public to explore city spending and contracts available in Checkbook NYC.
Sign up for March 9 workshops open now.
The NYC Comptroller’s Office is joining NYC Open Data Week (March 5-13) by hosting public demonstrations of Checkbook NYC, an award-winning online tool for financial transparency. Checkbook NYC provides unprecedented access to view and track how New York City government spends its approximately $98.5 billion annual budget. Introductory and advanced workshops on Checkbook NYC will be held on March 9, and future workshops will be held quarterly.
Wednesday, March 9th – Checkbook Workshops 9:00 AM — Getting to Know Checkbook: This session will include a broad overview of the type of data that Checkbook offers and a guided tour of the site’s functionality. Time: 9:00 – 10:00 AM [Register link] 2:00 PM — Advanced Searches: This will contain an overview of the different search mechanisms within Checkbook and understanding which search technique is best suited for specific queries. Actual queries are welcome as examples. Time: 2:00 – 3:00 PM [Register link] All demos will be conducted by the Checkbook NYC Team; Nicole Boone and Edward Sokolowski. Future Checkbook workshops will be held quarterly, in June, September, and December. Sign up here for updates. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Open Data Law and the 6th annual Open Data Week. NYC Open Data Week is an initiative organized by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, NYC Open Data at the Office of Technology and Innovation, BetaNYC and Data Through Design, with support from the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech. NYC Open Data Week advances open government, increases data literacy, and celebrates civic engagement. To see the full list of this year’s Open Data Week events, visit open-data.nyc. As the agency tasked with fiscal oversight and accountability, the Comptroller’s Office shares a commitment to transparency and is proud to be a resource for New Yorkers looking to understand and analyze the City’s spending and contracting. “In my office, we believe every week is open data week,” said Comptroller Brad Lander. “Checkbook NYC empowers the public to keep an eye on how public resources are being spent, with detailed, up-to-date information about expenditures, contracts, payroll, and revenue. I commend Comptroller Liu for the vision that brought forth the first iteration of Checkbook NYC and Comptroller Stringer for improving and expanding this unparalleled tool for municipal transparency. This week, we added a new dashboard for the public to see and track how NYC is spending $11 billion in COVID relief aid. Making this data available to the public gives us the chance to partner with New Yorkers to provide oversight, identify inefficiencies and inequities, and work together to improve how government delivers services.” “Thank you Comptroller Lander for joining us in celebrating Open Data Week this year,” said NYC Chief Analytics Officer Martha Norrick. ”Through publishing robust data, creating a user-friendly tool – Checkbook NYC – to access that data, and teaching sessions this week to help users work with that data, the Comptroller’s Office is making an important contribution to the Office of Technology and Innovation’s mission of making Open Data more accessible to New Yorkers.” “Thank you Comptroller Brad Lander for helping us kick off NYC’s School of Data and Open Data week” said Noel Hidalgo, Executive Director of BetaNYC. “When we were fighting for the City’s open data law, Checkbook NYC was near and dear to our hearts. Checkbook NYC has always been an example of an agency sharing detailed information via a simple to use website AND providing that underlying information in a machine-readable format. No paywalls nor FOIL request! Government data 24/7! We’re looking forward to your ongoing support of NYC School of Data and Open Data Week!” In July 2010, Comptroller John Liu launched the beta version of Checkbook NYC, an online transparency tool that for the first time placed the City’s day-to-day spending in the public domain. Then in 2013 Comptroller Liu launched Checkbook 2.0, making NYC top in the nation for financial transparency and set work in progress for Checkbook 3.0 to include apps that provide access to revenue data, sub-contracting information, agency budgetary conditions, and mapping of capital projects. During the Stringer Administration, four updates were performed to enhance the City’s Checkbook. The Checkbook NYC 2.0 website was developed in collaboration with REI Systems, a firm that worked with the Obama Administration to launch several federal transparency websites, including USAspending.gov, DATA.gov, and ITdashboard.gov. This week, NYC Comptroller Brad Lander unveiled a Federal Stimulus Fund Tracker on CheckbookNYC to bring transparency and accountability to city spending of COVID-19 relief funds. This new dashboard tracks spending from FY 2022 onward of nearly $11 billion in Federal pandemic relief funding for New York City. In addition to the data available on CheckbookNYC, the City’s Open Data Portal includes the following data sets relevant to the Comptroller’s work: data regarding individual claims filed and settled against the City of New York; holdings data from City Retirements Systems; Proxy Voting Records from City Retirement Systems; and data related to outstanding New York City bonds, interest rate exchange agreements, and projected debt service on those bonds. That data is available here. Many of the datasets on NYC Open Data the Open Data Portal can be filtered, downloaded, and steered as needed for deeper analysis. The Comptroller’s office also makes available online audit, policy, and budget reports (here) and documents related to Pension and Investment Management and City Bonds (here). Sign up for the March 9 Checkbook NYC workshops, or get on the list for future workshops here: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/checkbooknyc-demos/
