Transparency

From Ohio Sunshine

This page is started with the idea of defining "transparency."

Much work has been done in this regard by Sunshine Review, which has developed this Transparency Checklist page. Among topics discussed at the time of this writing are budgets, open meetings, elected and appointed officials, ethics, audits, contracts, lobbying public records, taxes, municipal code, user-friendliness and other issues.

The Center for Transparent and Accountable Government at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions has defined transparency across five domains. A White Paper on the topic is available here. The three major domains are fiscal transparency, jurisdictional transparency, and elections transparency. The two subsidiary domains are administrative transparency and public records transparency.

A category of special interest is performance audits. Audits customarily would be understood as financial documents and so might be considered a part of fiscal transparency. Performance audits, however, are more broad in scope and are in the nature of comprehensive consulting analysis of overall organizational performance and mission. The tentative position of CTAG is that performance audits are likely to belong within the administrative domain.

A great deal of work has been done on performance auditing by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Washington state. A performance audit definition page within this wiki may be found here, Definitions--Performance Audits.