KLRD demonstrates CanView and eSupplier portals for public procurement and vendor transparency

Steven Wu, managing fiscal analyst with KLRD, demonstrated two public tools that provide state procurement, revenue and vendor payment transparency: the CanView portal (Kansas taxpayer transparency online) and the eSupplier contract portal run by the Department of Administration.

Wu showed committee members how to query expenditures, revenues and vendor payments by fiscal year and agency in CanView and how to download datasets for offline review. He illustrated vendor‑payment detail using an agency example and warned that vendor extracts can be extremely large (one agency’s fiscal‑year vendor‑payment export ran to hundreds of pages). Wu noted CanView is retrospective (accounting ledger data) and distinguished it from the state budgeting system, which is forward‑looking.

On eSupplier, Wu walked senators through the contract search tool that lists active contracts, suppliers, expiration dates and attachments. He showed that where contract text is publicly available, the portal provides download attachments for review; if a contract is not public for legal reasons it will not be attached. Wu also said the Department of Administration scrubs personal‑identifiable information from the datasets before they are published and maintains an exclusions list for items not included in the public feeds.

Committee members asked for links and sample reports; Wu said KLRD had placed sample vendor and contract reports on shared staff drives and provided guidance on using the CanView data download center for large queries.

Ending: Senators praised the portals as resources for oversight and asked staff to circulate the portal links and the sample exports KLRD prepared to committee members.