The Citizens' Checkbook
Every payment Vermont state government has cut to an outside party since 2009 — 2.59 million checks — queried live from the state's own books. No middleman, no spin: your browser asks the State of Vermont's servers directly. Search it. Question it. Then use the tools at the bottom to make somebody answer.
The big picture
Total vendor payments by state fiscal year (July–June), fetched from data.vermont.gov the moment you loaded this page. This is not the whole budget — it excludes state payroll and includes federal pass-through dollars — but it is every check written to a vendor, grantee, or contractor.
Loading live totals from the State of Vermont…
Search a vendor
Type any name — a company, a nonprofit, a law firm, your town, your neighbor's excavation business. If the state ever paid them, it's here. Click a result to see the full history and generate a records request about it.
Heads-up: the state spells its own vendors inconsistently ("Gainwell Technologies LLC" and "Gainwell Technologies, LLC" are separate entries under the same vendor number). Search broadly and add the pieces up.
Explore a department
Pick any department or agency. See its spending trend since 2010, who it pays, and what it books the money under. Growth since FY2019 is the number to watch — that's the pre-COVID baseline spending never returned to.
The range scopes the vendor and account tables. The trend chart always shows full history.
Start-here leads
FYIVT ran seventeen years of the checkbook through anomaly screens — growth outliers, duplicate payments, vendor concentration, threshold games. These are the open questions that survived. Every one has a "check it yourself" button that runs the query live against the state's data, so you never have to take our word for it.
1. The $1.44 billion row with no name on it
One row in the state's transparency dataset has no date, no vendor, no department, and no account — just $1,445,153,228.60. That's about 1.5% of every dollar in the file. It may be a lawful aggregation of confidential payments (child support, foster care) — but the state doesn't label it, and taxpayers shouldn't have to guess.
2. Spending never came back down
Vendor payments ran $5.0B in FY2019, spiked with federal COVID money, and settled at a permanently higher floor: $8.16B in FY2026 — the highest year on record, four years after ARPA ended, in a state whose population grew about 3%. Screening every department over $10M for spending decreases since FY2019 found essentially one: the Department of Labor. The ratchet turns one way.
3. One Medicaid contractor lineage: ~$25 billion and counting
The state's biggest payee is one continuous relationship under four names — EDS → HP Enterprise Services → DXC → Gainwell Technologies, the Medicaid fiscal agent — collecting roughly $25B since 2010, $2.25B in FY2026 alone. Most is claims money passing through, which is exactly the problem: the public checkbook doesn't separate the contractor's fee from the pass-through, and its improper-payment rate lives in audit reports most people never read.
4. The fastest-growing departments (FY2019 → FY2026)
Verified against account-level detail, corrected for department renames. Click any row to open it in the explorer above. Broadband buildout, flood recovery, IT contracts, and home-care rates are the engines.
5. A law firm's state receipts went from $0.7M to $19.6M in two years
Deppman Law PLC — a Middlebury closing firm — collected $19.6M in FY2026, up from $730K in FY2024. Drill-down shows it's the escrow conduit for state land purchases and the flood buyout program. Not fraud on its face — but one firm handling the money side of a disaster program raises fair questions: how was it selected, what does it charge, who audits the trust account?
Take action
Finding something is half the job. Vermont law gives you the other half: under the Public Records Act (1 V.S.A. §§ 315–320), any person can demand records from any state agency — no reason required — and the agency must respond within 3 business days. Use the generator, then send it by email to the agency's records officer.
Records request generator
Tips: ask for records, not answers ("all invoices from…" beats "why did you…"). Ask for electronic copies to avoid fees. If denied, the agency must cite the specific statutory exemption — and denials are appealable.
The pathways
Confidential form for reporting fraud, waste, and abuse of state resources. This office exists for exactly this.
auditor.vermont.gov → fraudEvery agency designates a public records officer. Start at the Agency of Administration's request page.
aoa.vermont.gov → records requestsThe statewide public records request database — useful for finding what an agency has already released.
Statewide request databaseThe annual federal Single Audit lists questioned costs and internal-control failures, agency by agency.
Single Audit reportsThe exact dataset this page queries — download all of it and check our work.
Vermont Vendor PaymentsBudgets, payroll, contracts, and federal dollars flowing into Vermont.
SPOTLIGHT portal · USAspending: VTThe Public Records Act — your right of access, the 3-day clock, and the exemption list agencies must cite.
1 V.S.A. § 315Send us the vendor, the numbers, and what you asked the state. We follow up and we credit tipsters.
editor@fyivt.comMethodology & honest caveats. All figures query the State of Vermont's Vendor Payments dataset (data.vermont.gov, id 786x-sbp3) live via the state's public API — this page has no database of its own. "FY" is the state fiscal year ending June 30. Vendor payments are not the whole state budget: they exclude state employee payroll and include federal pass-through money (Medicaid claims, FEMA, ARPA). Large vendor totals can be program dollars passing through a fiscal agent, not vendor profit. The state records the same vendor under multiple spellings; totals shown are per-spelling unless noted. A big number is a question, not an accusation — the records request is how you turn one into the other.
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