How to find an itemized budget of a local government?

Surprisingly, this question was asked by a fellow OSINT person who wanted to analyze the budget for his local police department and know the ins and outs of their expenses.

I thought this was an excellent piece to add to this Substack since we are all about finding data and information that are publicly available and open source.

So how do you find such information?

In college, I had to take a few economic courses and one of them was a required program course called Public Sector Budgeting. In this course, we were assigned to groups and had a major assignment of breaking down the entire budget of a city for a fiscal year.

The first item on our assignment was to find the budget! You do this before selecting the city you want to do because not all governments have this information readily available online for download. In some cases, you have to request it and that can take several weeks or months to get. This would be too long for a 4-month college semester obviously.

First, go to the chosen city government’s website.

For my assignment, I had the City of Coral Gables.

Once there, I click on “Your Government” and scroll down to “Finance Department.”

I then scroll down to “Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports.” There is a list of reports from 2023 back to 2017. Keep in mind that applicable laws typically require a city government to make readily available up to seven years of reports. This is why there is 7 years available.

When you click on the most recent report, you open up a 149-page PDF document which is their city financial report that shows their expenditures and revenue sources. This report is fairly general, but it outlines the city budget and where their money is being spent.

You have to understand that every website is different and ever budget is different. I recall the City of Miami had a very detailed budget that included line-itemization for their police department which included requests for payment and whether or not that request was authorized or rejected. It even included priorities such as a museum that had a ceiling collapse that needed repairs.

You should search your city’s government website and look for anything related to finance or budget.