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Tech Talent: How Fixing One File Can Collect Money for Cities

whitehouse.gov

Towns and cities in Virginia are perpetually short of cash, but a Charlottesville man says there’s an easy fix.  If they could get one state commission to share a single computer file, they could collect at least $200 million.  

Waldo Jaquith heads U.S. Open Data - a non-profit set up to help people in government understand how to use all the information they gather to better serve the public.  Lately he’s been looking at the State Corporation Commission. 

Anyone who starts a business here is required to register with the SCC.  A list of Virginia companies should be public information, but the SCC told Jaquith he would have to pay $150 a month to have a look.  He thought that was wrong, so he decided to pay up and prove the point.   

“The data is terrible.  I mean it’s very messy. It’s in a format that I’ve never heard of that I gather was popular in the early 1980’s.”

Using his considerable computer skills, he was able to post information about all 806,881 companies to a website called vabusinesses.org. Then, he waited for the SCC to file suit.

“That was my exit strategy.  They would sue me, I would be defended by the good folks at the ACLU-in fact I checked with them on this first, and then we would prove to be right, and they would have to give away the data.”

But the SCC did nothing, and Jaquith has been paying $150 a month for nearly a year - sharing the information with anyone who wants it.

“I got an e-mail from a woman out of the blue who works for a town in Virginia, and she asked if there was some way for her to get the list of corporations registered in their town, and she explained to me that they, like many municipalities throughout Virginia, charge a business license fee.  They have no way of knowing what businesses are registered in the town, so they don’t know who’s not paying their license fees.”

He wrote some code to get her that information, and then he shared it with the revenue director of his home town.

“A huge percentage, about a third of businesses registered in Charlottesville, do not have a business license.  Now a certain percentage of those businesses don’t need to have licenses.  But even if we assume, though - if 80% of them don’t need licenses just to pick a very large number --  we’re still left with about half a million dollars in revenue  every year. Extrapolating from the money Charlottesville is missing out on, on the low end, we’re probably looking at a couple of hundred million dollars every year that is not being collected by the 130-odd municipalities across Virginia.”

Jaquith isn’t sure why a branch of state government wouldn’t help local governments to enforce the law.  It wouldn’t mean a big loss of revenue.  Only seven customers, including Jaquith, pay for the list each month.  Maybe, he says, the state lacks technically gifted talent and software that makes it easy to manage information.

“It’s endemic in government, state, local and federal, of a lack of tech talent.  There are some very capable people out there, but not enough, and they’re not capitalized on properly, and I don’t doubt that’s as true for the SCC as anywhere else.” 

So Jaquith is helping cities that have called him to search for their missing corporations, and at least one group thinks that’s swell.  The Shuttleworth Foundation heard what he was doing and gave him $5,000 to offset the cost of trying to make public information from the SCC public. 

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief
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