Montgomery County Maryland Financial Transparency Suite

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

For several years, the Department of Finance and Office of Management and Budget had posted spending data and budget information in either a summary or static format on the Montgomery County, Maryland website. In 2012, Montgomery County launched an open data initiative, dataMontgomery, making County data available to the public. Based on experience with the limited number of visits to the previously posted financial data and the expanded abilities provided by dataMontgomery, Montgomery County had a vision of progressing from simply showing our complex financial data to providing a way to promote understanding of how we do business, improve access to detailed financial data, and increase interaction with residents. The result of this vision is a financial transparency suite, which includes the rollout of a comprehensive Online Open Budget, including a guided view of the County budget and an online budget publication and of spendingMontgomery, a multi-dimensional site showing how Montgomery County spends money. Montgomery County has achieved the goal of not only providing financial transparency, but expanding our resident outreach and engagement by providing an innovative way to help display and explain complex budget and spending data and providing unprecedented access to detailed, downloadable financial data. This realized concept and universal data standard has become a nationally recognized best practice.