In an effort to promote government transparency and accountability, Comptroller DiNapoli created Open Book New York, an easy-to-use website providing public access to information on how New York State and its local governments are spending your tax dollars.

Through Open Book New York, taxpayers can retrieve up to 16 years of financial information for individual units of local government. Users can now easily compare their government’s calculation of the property tax cap, as well as revenue, expenditure, and other tax data with those of other local governments, regardless of class. In addition, users can “drill down” to retrieve additional information on each category of revenue and expense for an individual local government or for an entire class of local governments (e.g., all cities). Easy-to-use graphics are also included to help understand the data.

In the coming years, the Local Government portion of Open Book New York will be expanded to include demographic information on our State and its inhabitants. Our goal for Open Book New York is to make it the preeminent source of data on local governments in New York State.