2008: State Legislation
Transparent Utah was first authorized by the Utah Legislature in 2008 with the goal of the creation of a website to ensure state and local government financial information is readily available to the public.
2009: Version 1.0
The first version transparent.utah.gov first went live in 2009 with state-level data and was run by the State Division of Finance.
2016 May: Remove Budget Threshold
Effective May 10, 2016, there is no longer an entity size requirement or budget threshold for reporting to Transparent Utah. Before, entities operating under $100k did not submit data.
2017 January: All Entities Began Reporting
With the begining of 2017, all local governments of all sizes began submitting transparency reports. This dramtically increased the number of participating entities.
2019 : Transfer to State Auditor
In 2019, responsibility for Transparent Utah was moved by the State Legislature, via HB 178 Transparency Website Amendments, from the Division of Finance to the Office of the State Auditor (OSA). The Office of the State Auditor was a significant user of the Transparent Utah data set, and was also already undertaking other public facing data and big data-centric projects and moving Transparent Utah was good mission fit.
2019 December Version 2.0
An update to Transparent Utah was launched in partnership with a third party vendor with an existing, cloud-based, transparency solution. At that time, the public was able to access the State of Utah’s financial information in a more visual application, however, local government information was not available in the new format due to vendor limitations.
2020
The Office of the State Auditor launched an internal project, recruiting an experienced serial entrepreneur with extensive big data experience, to architect and build a new system.
2020 July: Version 3.0
Transparent Utah Version 3.0 was launched and included both State and Local Entity data in a single, visual application, allowing analysis and comparisons across entities in ways never done before. This latest version of Transparent Utah also included a streamlined tool system for the most popular searches:
- Employee Compensation Search
- Highest Paid Employees
- Vendor Payments Search
- Highest Paid Vendors
- Entity Overview
- Transaction Details
- Where Does State Money Go?
2020 October: CARES
COVID - CARES Dashboard is deployed. This allows citizens to track CARES relief spending and payments to vendors
2020 November: Compliance Dashboard
Entity Reporting Compliance Dashboard gives real time updates on which reports local governments (city, county, school, district, etc.) have submitted and what they are missing.
2020 December: Data Quality Research
Data Quality Initiative Begins. Data submitted to transparent utah is owned and created by over 1300 governmental entities, and sometimes that data is incorrect. The OSA investigated algorithms to automatically flag data quality issues.
2021 May: Data Quality Dashboard
Data Quality Dashboard deployed. This dashboard used 8 different algorithms to flag data for local governments to fix and displays each issue using visuals and tables. This dashboard has resulted in thousands of corrected reports
2021 July: File Preparer
The OSA develops and publishes a custom application that makes reporting data much easier for smaller local governments. This tool is called "Transparent Utah File Preparer".
2021 September: Verson 3.1
Transparent Utah gets a makeover. The theme is updated to fit accessibility standards and query latency is reduced from an average of 10s to below 2 seconds.
2021 December: Job Title Search
Six dashboards are created to compare compensation packages by job title are published:
- Custom Search
- Compare Two Entities
- Wage Trends
- Highest Paid
- Most Common Jobs
- Local Government Officers/Roles
2022 Jan: Fiscal Health Distress Dashboard
Financial distress is the inability of an entity to maintain existing service levels, withstand local and regional economic disruptions, and meet the demands of growth or decline. The OSA creates a dashboard that used industry standard indicators for fiscal distress of local governments. This dashboard aims to identify entities who are in trouble before a larger issue occurs.
2022 Feb: ARPA Dashboard
Similar to the CARES dashboard, a seperate dashboard to track ARPA funds is created to help track and monitor spending of ARPA relief funds.
2022 August: Daily State ETL
The OSA develops an Extract-Transform-Load process to load the "State of Utah's" data every morning instead of once a month. This makes Transparent Utah nearly real-time for transactions under the State of Utah's executive agencies.
2022 October: Began Property Tax Performance Audit
The OSA began the analysis and development of Property Tax Assessment central database to help determine if assessments have been fair and equal.
2023 July: Property Tax Database and Dashboard
Deployed the Property Tax Dashboard which helps taxpayers and policymakers better understand property assessment in Utah. This tool allows anyone to examine property values across the State based on various metrics.
2024 New Projects:
The Office of the State Auditor continues to develop new tools for the public and researchers to understand government finance. We are working on:
- Fiscal Trend Analysis
- Custom Search Builder
- Batch Summary (for Submitters)