Government Wiki — Library of CAFRs and Single Audits

The client introduced to us a project with the goal of gathering and displaying the USA state and local government financial information. He already had a database for California state, and our task was to expand it, add required features, cover all the states and realize his ideas in full.

We started with an encyclopedia of financial statements, officials and social measurements of California State counties. The client gave us a list of prioritized states to work with, and by now Puerto Rico, California and Texas are covered. We’ve also developed a platform allowing to publicly discuss the decisions and initiatives of the municipal authority for Puerto Rico.

Another important task was to create a library of CAFRs and Single Audits. As such information is usually very hard to find, this library is intended to save researchers’ time and effort. In this regard, we implemented data scrapers for financial statements and built custom crawlers for each source repository. Scrapers were developed with Python. We’ve already implemented crawling scripts for Arizona, Georgia, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Washington, Ohio, Oregon.

The information is also collected with the help of Public Sector Credit Framework (JavaScript) — an open source methodology for computing default probabilities and ratings on sovereign and sub-sovereign bond issuers. The data is crawled from the Census Bureau’s Harvester system, which stores Single Audits from governments and nonprofits spending more than $750,000 in federal funds annually. We also have crawlers for state document repositories which will be run on an irregular basis. The crawling tools are open source.

In 2018 the library was released and we continue to maintain it.