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Tax Dollar Watch
Tax Dollar Watch
Where your local tax money comes from, and exactly what it's spent on — read straight from each government's own budget report, procurement portal, or check register. Nothing here is estimated or filled in when the source leaves it blank. Every number links back to the original government document so you can check it yourself.
- Budget lines
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- Open bids & solicitations
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- Vendor payments on record
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Click any number above, or any bar, vendor, or agency name below, to see exactly what it's made of.
Search everything, across every government
One search across every budget item, account, department, fund, vendor, and payment description this database has — for every government at once. Only records already verified and imported are searched; nothing here is inferred, estimated, or filled in for a government or record that isn't actually in the database yet.
| Government | Type | Department | Fund | Item / Description | Vendor | Budgeted | Actual / Paid | % Used | Fiscal Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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The short version
This is the selected government's budget for the year, in plain terms: what each department plans to spend, where the money comes from, and which companies get paid the most. It's a snapshot as of the most recent report on file — the most recent report the selected government has published. There's no single “total budget” number here on purpose: most governments keep their money in separate funds (a general fund, a water fund, a sanitation fund, and so on), and not every fund reports both what it takes in and what it spends out in the same report. Adding them all together would produce a number that doesn't actually mean anything — so instead, everything below is broken out honestly, the way the government itself reports it. Use the dropdown at the top of the page to switch governments — St. Tammany Parish Government, the School Board, the Sheriff's Office and each city are separate taxing authorities with their own budgets, never combined into one number here.
Where the money goes — spending by department
What the selected government has budgeted to spend this year, by department, largest first. Bar length shows the share of total budgeted spending shown here.
Where the money comes from — revenue by source
What the selected government expects to collect this year, by source (taxes, fees, grants, and so on), largest first. Amounts are shown as what's collected — some governments' own books record revenue as a negative number internally, but there's nothing negative about money coming in.
Who gets paid the most
The vendors and companies the selected government has paid the most money to, based on every payment on record so far.
The full detail
Everything above comes from the detailed, line-by-line records below. Search or sort any of them to dig into a specific department, vendor, fund, or bid.
Browse the selected government's own budget-to-actual report, broken out by fund, department and account — use the dropdown at the top of the page to switch governments. Budgeted is what was set aside; YTD Actual is what has actually been collected or spent so far this fiscal year. Every category subtotal here has been checked against its own detail lines — a category is only shown if the source's own numbers add up to the penny.
| Fund | Department | Category / Account | Type | Budgeted | YTD Actual (spent/collected) | Available (left) | % Used |
|---|
Open bids and solicitations from every government tracked here, read directly from the government's own procurement page or the state's LaPAC bid portal. A company listed here has done nothing wrong by bidding for public work — this is the invitation to bid, not an award.
| Government | Title | Status | Published | Source |
|---|
Each government's own check register, one payment per row, read directly from the source. This shows what has actually been paid out — search a company name to see everything it has been paid, or a fund name to see what has come out of it. This list is being backfilled month by month and will keep growing.
| Date | Vendor | Amount | Fund | Description | Source |
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