"These dollars belong to the people of our state"

Accountable transparency is the new democracy. This is the heading to a very important piece in the Financial Times. Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, discusses what he calls "accountable transparency" - making state budgets, contracts and individual expenditures available to the public on the internet.

For example (more details here) -

• The governor of Texas has put his own governor's office expenses on the web in a searchable form.
  
  
• Also in Texas, any school district that cannot prove that it is spending at least 65% of its education budget in the classroom must publish its payments - every single expenditure item - online for citizens to inspect.
  
  
• Indiana's governor put his state's contracts on the internet on the day he took office.
  
  
• Five states have passed laws mandating various levels of transparency. Legislation was introduced or debated in a dozen others and, says Norquist, is set to pass next spring.

Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri has put up the Missouri Accountability Portal ("Map Your Taxes") website, which posts a wide range of government expenditures.

As Norquist explains, you can look up the actual expense records of your favourite politician and bureaucrat. A linked website provides access to the actual contracts let by the state. There are other plans, including the posting of state employee salaries.

The Governor says:

One of my goals has been to transform state government by using technology to improve efficiency and enhance transparency. The old-way bureaucrats like the paper-based system, which empowers them and is less accountable to taxpayers. Few Missourians can take the time to root through mounds of paperwork in some department to find out where their taxes are going. Missourians deserve openness in state spending.

And - in words which everyone paid by the state should have visible to them all day - he adds:

These dollars belong to the people of our state

The Map Your Taxes website has received more than 600,000 hits in its first few weeks.

Norquist points out that accountable transparency is working up from the more local levels to the national level, and that it is popular with the media. Most of the information in most states is already legally public information. And it needn't be expensive. Governor Blunt "put the entire state finances online without a single additional appropriation - just using existing staff and resources".

Here we have something extremely unusual - a simple idea which is powerful enough to bring about a huge increase in democracy at minimal cost.

Its time seems to be coming in the USA. How long will it be before it starts to cross the Atlantic?

One can foresee determined rearguard actions being fought by politicians and officials in the UK. (To take a trivial example, MPs' expenses, anyone?) But "these pounds belong to the people of our country".

One of the jobs of the Taxpayers' Alliance is to unfurl this banner and bring the issue into our political discourse.

Will an MP make a start by introducing accountable transparency for his own office?

And what of the EU? Who will take up the long fight to make accountable transparency mandatory for all EU expenditure?

"These euros belong to the peoples of the EU."