MassOpenBooks is part of Pioneer Institute’s Initiative to promote transparency in government. Our premise is that you cannot manage what you can’t measure, and you certainly can’t keep track of something, if you don’t even know it's there.
As long as public spending data is not easily made available to the public, government will not be accountable.
Where does data from MassOpenBooks come from?
MassOpenBooks is built on public data made available by the State’s Comptroller’s Office and the Massachusetts Retirement Board.
What has Pioneer Institute done to date?
Since 2007, Pioneer’s work on transparency has been focused on local government, particularly government performance in those Massachusetts cities that receive the bulk of state aid, in an effort to measure whether the state taxpayer money being provided those cities is achieving results.
As of 2009, Pioneer Institute is including in its efforts transparency at the state level. Upon seeing the success that other states have achieved with an online database platform, Pioneer created an online tool that offers taxpayers data easy to access regarding their state government expenditures.
In addition to the online tool, Pioneer uses other media to raise awareness about the need to have “open books” in Massachusetts, through mailings, blogs and op-eds. We do this particularly because no less than three major ethics investigations are underway in the Massachusetts House and Senate and that, in the wake of the failure of a ballot measure to eliminate the state income tax, the Governor and legislature immediately and publicly began discussing tax and toll increases.
In addition to our efforts to bring greater transparency to Massachusetts state government through MassOpenBooks, Pioneer completed a public school district transparency online database in the Spring of 2009.
