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Committee approves bill to shift architecture and engineering contract reporting from monthly to annual
Summary
The committee approved House Bill 704, an agency-sponsored bill from the Department of Audits and Accounts that would change reporting on state contracts with architecture and engineering firms from monthly to annual submissions and publish the data as a searchable dashboard on the Open Georgia website.
The committee approved House Bill 704 on a voice vote after a presentation from the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts.
Carol Schwinni, executive director at the Department of Audits and Accounts, told the committee that HB 704 would change an existing requirement for state agencies, colleges, universities and technical colleges to submit monthly statistics on contracts with architecture and engineering firms to an annual submission and would move the published reporting from monthly PDF reports to an online dashboard on the state’s Open Georgia site. "What we are asking for in House Bill 704 is to move a monthly requirement to an annual requirement instead," Schwinni said.
Schwinni said the current requirement dates to a law passed in 1970 and results in a monthly PDF report that the agency posts covering a rolling 36-month period. She said the department already receives annual professional-services data from agencies at the end of the fiscal year and would pull that information, publish it once yearly on Open Georgia and build filtering capabilities so users can query by location or other attributes. "We would be able to set up filters," she said, so that users such as local firms or agency leaders could pull statistics for their particular needs.
Representative Bazemore asked why the change would be annual rather than quarterly or semiannually; Schwinni said switching to any frequency other than annual would still require agencies to submit additional interim data that the department would have to clean and prepare for publication. She added that much of the monthly reporting is redundant because agencies repeatedly post the same contract information over many months as contracts persist. The department said it would pull data reported at the end of the fiscal year (filed in September) and use that as the basis for the dashboard.
Schwinni also described the bill’s recent history: a similar measure (filed last year as HB 1199) passed the Georgia House unanimously but did not advance out of the Senate Rules Committee. She supplied the current bill’s Legislative Counsel number as LC461157.
A motion to approve the measure was made and seconded; the committee approved the bill by voice vote and the motion passed.
The bill would change the frequency and format of public reporting but does not eliminate the underlying annual data agencies are already required to provide, according to the presenter. The committee did not record a roll-call vote or named movers and seconders in the transcript.
