FIN-01 · Money on the record

What Open Georgia publishes about state spending

Open Georgia gathers the State of Georgia’s spending files in one place, from state employee salaries and travel reimbursements to budget reports, performance reviews and tax expenditure data, updated once a year.

Published 6 September 2026 · The Georgia Records Desk editorial team

One front door for files that used to live apart

Georgia publishes its money in several places at once, and Open Georgia is the site built to pull the spending side together. Its own description calls it "a gateway for obtaining information and key documents about how the State of Georgia spends tax dollars and other revenues to provide services to Georgians." In other words, this is not a site that produces the numbers itself. It collects files that come from various state agencies and presents them under one address.

The site states that the information maintained on it is updated annually. That single rhythm matters for how you use it: if you are looking for a payment made last month, this is not where it appears. If you are looking for the standing record of what the state pays, owes and reports over a year, it is. This page sits inside the wider map of where Georgia publishes its own accounts, and it is the entry point for the spending files described below. Everything in this article was checked 5 September 2026.

Whose salaries and travel you can look up

The first document set on Open Georgia covers salaries and travel reimbursements. The page says you can "find salaries and travel reimbursements paid to employees of the State of Georgia and employees of local boards of education." That sentence carries two facts worth pausing on. First, the file is not limited to state agencies: local boards of education are included, so school system employees appear here too. Second, the file covers both pay and travel reimbursement, two kinds of spending that are often searched for separately.

For school finances more broadly, there is a companion page on this guide covering where Georgia school system finances are published, since local board pay is one part of a larger set of education money files. The Open Georgia page does not say how far back the salary records go or in what format the data downloads; it names the coverage and leaves the rest to the site itself.

What counts as an expenditure here?

A second section lists payments, obligations and professional services expenditures made by state organizations. The distinction between a payment and an obligation is the useful one: a payment is money that has left the treasury, while an obligation is a commitment the state has taken on. The professional services line covers the money state organizations spend on outside providers rather than on their own payroll.

Next to each of these sections the page places a "Non Compliance Report." The page we read does not explain what these reports contain or who compiles them, so this guide will not fill that gap with guesswork. The label is there, the explanation is not.

Which financial reports sit on the site?

The financial reports section gathers the standing documents that describe the state’s budget and finances. Five are named outright: the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, a Budgetary Compliance report, the Budget in Brief, the Single Audit, and a report on User Fees. Each answers a different question, and the names tell you which question before you download anything.

The Annual Comprehensive Financial Report is the full accounting of state finances. The Budget in Brief is the short version of the budget story. The Single Audit is the federal-oriented audit review, the Budgetary Compliance report tests spending against what was authorized, and the User Fees report covers what the state charges for its services. If you want to know who writes and audits these documents, the separate page on what the Department of Audits and Accounts publishes is the next stop, since Open Georgia is a gateway rather than the author of record.

Does the site cover local government money too?

It does, in a defined way. The page lists financial information for local governments as its own section, alongside a set of SPLOST reports, where SPLOST stands for the special local option sales tax. That places county and municipal money on the same site as state money, which is convenient if your question crosses both levels.

There is also an ARRA entry, for American Recovery & Reinvestment Act funds, and an Economic Development Info section. The page gives these items as labels without describing their contents, so the honest statement is that the site names them and you have to open them to see what is inside.

How are programs judged?

Beyond raw spending, Open Georgia carries performance reviews. The page describes these as reports "that evaluate how well various state programs are operating." This is the section to reach for when your question is not how much was spent but what the spending produced. A performance review connects a program’s operation to its results, which is a different document from a ledger or an audit.

The page does not list which programs have been reviewed or how often the reviews are refreshed. It states only the purpose of the section. If a program you care about has no review here, the absence is information too, and the route to asking for more is the one described in how a Georgia open records request works.

The tax files and one quirk worth knowing

The tax section of Open Georgia includes a Tax Expenditures Report, and the page offers a download of the 2027 Tax Expenditure Report Data. A tax expenditure is revenue the state does not collect because of an exclusion, exemption or preference in the tax code, so the report measures the cost of those choices rather than the money that arrived. The specific 2027 data download is the one dated item the page names.

One practical footnote: the page carries a notice that the site supports Adobe version 7.0 or higher, a reminder that several of these documents are PDFs rather than spreadsheets. The copyright line at the bottom reads "Copyright © 2008 DOAA," which points to the Department of Audits and Accounts as the operating office behind the gateway.

Your concrete move is simple. Open the site linked below, pick the section that matches your question, salaries, expenditures, financial reports, performance reviews or tax, and note the exact report name before you download. If you later need something the site does not carry, you will request it by that name.