UA Launches Website Documenting Expenses
by July 6, 2012 9:37 am 72 views
The University of Arkansas’ new website, OpenUA.uark.edu, is intended to provide online documentation of public expenses paid by all the university’s offices, departments and divisions.
Act 1163 passed by the Arkansas Legislature last year requires all state institutions of higher education to provide “expenditure data on a website operated by the state-supported institution” beginning with fiscal 2013, and eventually showing at least 10 years of information. The information must be updated regularly.
Although the law only requires the website to begin by showing data for fiscal 2013, which began July 1, the university chose to display expenditure figures for the previous fiscal year as well.
“In order to organize and build the OpenUA website, we needed to have a very detailed idea of what information would be included,” said Don Pederson, vice chancellor for finance and administration. “The best way to do that was to use the actual data we had on hand for this current fiscal year. Once we had the site built, there wasn’t any reason to delete that data. This is information we want Arkansans to be able to access, so we have no problem providing more than the Legislature mandated.”
The website will be updated monthly and cover a series of broad categories, providing details on public money spent, the purpose, amount, who paid and who received the payment, unless any of that information is exempt under the state Freedom of Information Act or federal confidentiality rules.