A Sacramento Superior Court judge dismissed a petition for writ of mandamus that would have required the Controller’s office to disclose line-by-line expenditures.
OpentheBooks.com, Adam Andrzejewski, and American Transparency sued California Controller Betty Yee last year after she responded to a request for production of documents by stating that the Controller’s office does not retain or is unable to access records involving vendor contractor payments.
Under the California Public Records Act, a state agency like the California Controller must make records available promptly to any person upon payment of fees after a request for reasonably identifiable records.
“I think the judge made a mistake,” Andrzejewski said. “The controller admitted to paying 49 million bills last year and the judge did not afford for the production of one single transaction.”
While OpentheBooks.com privately collects and evaluates U.S. public-sector spending documents, the Controller's office is responsible for disbursing California's finances.
During oral arguments on Nov. 19 between counsel for OpentheBooks.com and Controller Betty Yee, Judge Steven Gevercer reviewed how a report on spending is provided when Gov. Gavin Newsom requests it and how the Controller’s office audits itself.
“Although the Controller refused to provide even a single transaction of state payments and the judge threw out our case against her, our organization went to plan B,” Andrzejewski told the Southern California Record. “We filed nearly 500 sunshine requests with every single state agency in California and they are producing the records.”
Those agencies include transportation, the judicial branch, colleges and universities, and the governor's office.
“We're assembling the California state checkbook like a jigsaw puzzle and this summer we'll be ready to post all of that data on our website,” Andrzejewski told the Southern California Record.
The litigation uncovered the following about bookkeeping in the Controller’s office.
The office manually reviews some $50 million in annual payments.
“We think she misled the court,” Andrzejewski said. “In the electronic age, there's no reason to have to manually review $50 million in payments. It's absurd on its face.”
The state has no central database to track the payments from over 500 separate agencies.
“Quite obviously, if you can make a payment, you can track the payment, so we think the Controller was being disingenuous with the court,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of payments are submitted on paper with their justifications held together on a string.
“There are 200,000 transactions that aren't electronic that are only kept on paper with the backup and that file is literally held together with string,” Andrzejewski added. “The Controller represented that each one of those payments would take up to 10 minutes to deconstruct and reconstruct to provide a public record to our auditors.”