Taxpayers across the country should thank Colorado State Representative Cindy Acree for her persistence and determination to hold Colorado’s Governor’s Energy Office (GEO) accountable. At the end of last week, she went public with her demand for a full blown audit, including performance and financial, of the “off-budget” agency that has been awash in federal stimulus [...]

Senator Rollie Heath was the chair of the ”Unimaginative Failure” Commission (a.k.a. Long Term Fiscal Stability Commission) on which I sat in 2009. Heath constantly asked “what kind of Colorado do we want?” As if a chosen few have the right to force an answer for more than five million people, but that did not stop [...]

Could a non-profit sell your private medical data to fund the on-going operational cost of the state’s All Payer Claims Database (APCD)? Maybe.
Last week COST detailed the developments in Colorado’s APCD, a state-mandated data warehouse of all your private healthcare transactions.
The Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF) spun off the non-profit Center for [...]

Colorado’s Public Employee Retirement Association (PERA) told statutory board member State Treasurer Walker Stapleton that it would not release information such as annual benefits, age of retirement, former job and zip code of the top 20 percent of pension recipients to him.
In an interview with Amy Oliver on News Talk 1310 KFKA, Stapleton said that [...]

Defining precisely what a so-called green job actually is and how many have been created in Colorado is perhaps the only job as hard as actually creating such emerald-hued employment— and a University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business survey due later this spring attempting to quantify the growth and qualify the nature of the [...]

Voters and residents of South Carolina move closer to finally being able to know how their legislators vote on issues critical and mundane alike, after a bill passed unanimously in the state’s lower chamber:
South Carolina law would require legislators to take a roll call on most of their votes under a proposal fast-tracked by House [...]

What happens when government is allowed to operate outside the purview of the public? “Corruption on steroids,” as District Attorney Steve Cooley described the abuse of taxpayers in Bell, CA.  Cooley further described the situation in a news conference announcing the arrest of eight elected officials and government employees from the small town outside of Los [...]

The state cannot pay its bills and taxpayers get blamed. And no one asks where did the more than $18 billion in taxpayer dollars go.
The Denver Post reports:
Temporarily short on money, Colorado has declared a fiscal emergency and delayed payments to doctors and clinics taking care of the state’s neediest patients.
The usual suspects are providing [...]

Apparently the state provides $500 lunches and taxpayers don’t need to know about them according to State Controller David McDermott.
The Denver Post reports that State Rep. BJ Nikkel, sponsor of the Colorado Taxpayer Transparency Act, accuses McDermott of violating the spirit of the law, violating taxpayer trust and violating transparency.
It’s easy to see Rep Nikkel’s point when McDermott [...]

A reporter asked Colorado Transparency Project Director Amy Oliver Cooke, a member of the Colorado Long Term Economic Stability Commission, if real cuts in spending need to be made in Colorado’s budget where would she make them?  She answered,
I don’t know because I don’t have specifics on where the state spends its money.  That’s why we need transparency.  If [...]