to provide for audits and the examination of books and records; to provide for the creation and maintenance of a website which provides public access to certain state expenditure information...
This means there is now a dearth of publicly available data. Citizens can explore the Georgia Transparency website or the Open Georgia website to find extensive data on education, expenditures, salary and travel reimbursements, financial reports, and program reviews. If you play around in the salaries and travel reimbursements search tool, you can actually see a name by name list of pay to employees of the State of Georgia and employees of local boards of education.
For example, UGA President Michael Adams had nearly double the salary of any other University System of Georgia president. He made $607,417.98 plus travel reimbursement of $7,779.14. Some of my friends are graduate assistants, and sure enough, they're in the system too. Somehow it seems creepier for me to check their salaries, though. I even found myself four times (for different positions in different years).
The main purpose of the data is not to allow graduate students to check whose stipend is the least meager. The hope is that transparency will lead to efficiency. Taxpayers in one county may notice that their county spends significantly more per capita for a particular service than other comparable counties. Then they could pressure their local government to find a more efficient way of providing that service in order to lower their taxes. Right now, the data is so many layers deep that it would take a REALLY dedicated and statistically-adept taxpayer to figure out this kind of thing. So one project I may work on is some of the initial analysis and making things more user friendly.
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