Save for accountants and tax lawyers, no one enjoys taxes. But even government minimalists would agree that taxes are necessary to pay for vital services like defense, road construction and maintenance, etc.  The problem is, figuring out where your tax dollars are spent can prove enormously difficult.

State governments are typically much worse at providing transparency into their expense accounts than the feds. But the process has just become a lot easier for residents of New York.

The Empire Center for New York Policy, a project of the conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, recently launched www.seethroughny.com. This transparency website, the first to be independently sponsored by a private, non-partisan organization, enables residents to access databases which detail the financial spending of the New York State government.

"SeeThroughNY is designed to become the hub of a statewide network through which taxpayers can share, analyze and compare data from local governments and school districts throughout New York," said Edmund J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center.

The website, which cost more than $100,000 to create, includes databases which contain complete lists of the more than 200,000 government employees in New York, their job titles, and salaries. They also have details on teachers' union and superintendent contracts for almost every school district in the state.

"We pay them, we have a right to know what we pay them," McMahon told the Associated Press.

And considering school taxes are some of the highest taxes property owners pay, one can expect that interested residents may be logging on to find out how much their child's teachers earn.

The website also offers access to a list of all "pork barrel" appropriations, or community projects, by the Legislature, as well as internal operations expenditures by the state Assembly and Senate. Supporters of SeethroughNY say that the site will enable citizens to hold politicians accountable for their spending.

"As the adage states, ‘knowledge is power'," said Susan Lerner, the Executive Director of Common Cause New York, a non-partisan citizen's lobby, "and, with the knowledge which SeeThroughNY allows New Yorkers to marshal, power can be exercised by the people to help government perform effectively and efficiently."

Kenneth Adams, the president and CEO of the Business Council of New York adds that the Web site "lifts the veil of secrecy that too often covers government spending in New York."

SeethroughNY was launched the same week that New York Governor David Patterson revealed the state's fiscal troubles may lead to a $1.2 billion cut from the current budget and a hiring freeze.

"The information on this website is especially valuable at a time of fiscal crisis, when tough choices need to be made and every tax dollar should be spent wisely and efficiently," said Adams.

However, not everybody is thrilled about the having all of this information on the Internet. Some state workers would rather their information remain private.

"Who wants to have their salaries revealed to the world?" Stephen Madarasz, spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association, told the Times Union. "So much of what [The Empire Center does] is about denigrating public service."

But Robert Freeman, head of the state Committee on Open Government, told Gannett News that revealing state employee salaries does not violate their privacy. In fact, he says that courts have consistently ruled that public employees have less privacy than other workers.

Still, one of New York's largest state employees unions, the Public Employees Federation (PEF), is claiming that the SeethroughNY could pose a threat to state employees' safety.

"The disclosure of this information and the ease of access to the information has ramifications regarding the personal safety of the individuals in the database," union President Ken Brynien wrote in an email to members. "There has been at least one instance brought to our attention where a co-worker of a member was living in a shelter for battered women and her estranged husband was able to identify her work location through the website and is now stalking her at her work site."

PEF spokeswoman Dracy Wells did not say whether the union would legally challenge the website and admits that legal precedents in similar cases do not favor the union.

McMahon agrees, confident that SeethroughNy has nothing to worry about.

"Ultimately, they're challenging the Freedom of Information Law....This doesn't say where people live. If the objection is, ‘now you've invaded my privacy and people can find me,' well, I've got news for you: We're all pretty easy to find, and it's everyone's business what you make if you work for the government."

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