Transparency Legislation Builds Momentum: Issa Announces Endorsements

WASHINGTON- Today, Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., sponsor of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) of 2011, announced the sweeping spending transparency legislation has been endorsed by a broad spectrum of organizations, releasing letters of support from 21 different groups.

Recently, Issa spoke via webcast to a packed house at O’Reilly Media’s Strata Conference about the importance of comprehensive, accurate federal spending data to improving decision making in the public and private sector.

 Read the DATA Act Endorsements

• Americans for Tax Reform: “Incompatible technologies and incomprehensible datasets make the process of cutting waste, redundancy, and inefficiency out of the federal budget nearly impossible. By unifying competing reporting mechanisms, the DATA Act will enable lawmakers and taxpayers to track every dollar the government spends and target unnecessary spending.”

• Open Government Coalition: “Our own experience with incomplete, incompatible, and incomprehensible government datasets underscores the importance of the government-wide standards.”

• American Institute of Certified Public Accountants: “the [Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency Board created by the bill] will be able to compare information from the Federal agencies to information from recipients, providing an unprecedented level of transparency for Federal spending.”

• National Taxpayers Union: “Advocates from across the political spectrum share the notion that transparency is a fundamental building block of good governance. At a time of mounting debt, it becomes all the more important to ensure Americans are equipped with the tools to track the flow of funds they send to Washington.”

The DATA Act will expand the role of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to track all federal spending, including grants, contracts, loans and agencies’ internal expenses, on a single electronic platform, using consistent reporting standards and data identifiers, and making all of the information available to the public. Read more about the DATA Act here.

 

• American Library Association

• Center for Fiscal Accountability

• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

• FreeGovInfo

• Government Accountability Project

• iSolon.org

• The Participatory Politics Foundation

• Project on Government Oversight

• Publish What You Fund

• The Sunlight Foundation

• FIX Protocol Ltd.

• International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication

• Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication

• XBRL.US

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