June 24, 2004 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Office of the State Auditor in North Carolina has added to its Web site a database of nonprofit organizations that receive funds from the state and the amount of money they receive.
Visitors to the site can search the information for the 2004 fiscal year by city, county, the name of the nonprofit organization, the state agency awarding the grant, or the amount of the award. Data are available back to the 2001 fiscal year, but with fewer searching options.
Dennis Patterson, a spokesman for the auditor’s office, says the hope is that by making the information easily available online, the public will act as “an extra set of eyes and ears” and alert the state to questionable activities. “The bad actors are really few and far between,” he says. “But we figure people in the community know the community better than we do, and if they suspect that there’s something going on, we’re more likely to hear about if they actually know that they’re getting the money.”
Mr. Patterson says that the information in the database used to be available to the public in book form, but that the book wasn’t easy to use. “You really had to want to know what was in there in order to find it,” he says.
More than 6,000 nonprofit organizations are slated to receive $414.7-million from the state of North Carolina in fiscal 2004.
To get there: Go to http://www.ncauditor.net/NonProfitSite/nphome.aspx.
