"It's very clear that it's a pilot site, intended to demonstrate the power of the data and request feedback from users," Riphagen told Techwire in an interview. "We only have three pilot departments right now, and by July 2019, we will expand to have all the departments that are using FI$Cal for their accounting."
Those 152 departments "represent 65 percent of the state's budgetary expenditures — that's the percent that are using FI$Cal," Riphagen said of the platform, provided by OpenGov.
When California is compared to other states by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), it ranks very low in transparency because data can be found only by going to multiple places and sites.
"We do not rank highly now," Riphagen said. "California has ranked near the bottom because we have information in lots of different systems. And one of the goals of FI$Cal is to bring all that information that is in all those disparate systems into one place, so you can be transparent about it."
Data from the state Treasurer's Office, which is responsible for the state's budget, will be included eventually, too. The office will be rolled onto FI$Cal's budgeting system next month.
The data is based on the state's general ledger, including transactions and spending that do not have vendors, like how much is expended from each funding source.
"Essentially, if it is an expenditure transaction, it's in here. We don't include fund balances, we don't include revenue, all the things that would allow you to recreate an entire set of financial documents for the state. It's just expenditures," Riphagen said.
There is a data lag of about two months, which lets departments confirm data accuracy and protected information, after an algorithm has scrubbed the information.
"We extract our data using a process internally. We extract it; it goes into the business intelligence tool. They review their data in the business intelligence tool and confirm that what they entered is accurate — that what we extracted is accurate and that there is no confidential information," Riphagen said.
The data can be shared or emailed. The information can be viewed in summary reports and even by transaction.
Viewers can parse the data in multiple ways and then download it in an Excel CSV file. Other download options may be available in the future, but that is what OpenGov provides now.
The site's open data principles are listed on the site, which encourage proactive transparency, inclusiveness and accessibility.
