Introducing the Citizens' Checkbook — and five questions the state should answer

Buried in Vermont's own financial transparency data is a single payment row with no date, no vendor, no department, and no account attached. Just a number: $1,445,153,228.60. That's about 1.5 percent of every dollar the state has paid out since 2009, sitting in the public ledger with no name on it.

It might have a boring explanation. Payments to child support recipients and foster families are lawfully kept confidential, and the state may have lumped them into one anonymous line. But nothing in the dataset says so — and when nearly a billion and a half dollars ships without a label, taxpayers shouldn't have to guess. The answer is one records request away — and the tool below will draft that letter for any Vermonter who wants it, no reason required, three-day clock and all.

That row is one of five findings from an FYIVT project that started with a simple question: what would it look like to run Vermont's checkbook through the kind of scrutiny Washington got? So we pulled the state's entire vendor payment ledger — 2.59 million checks from September 2009 through June 2026, published at data.vermont.gov — and screened all of it for growth outliers, duplicate payments, vendor concentration, and procurement games.

One honest caveat before the findings: vendor payments aren't the whole budget. They exclude state payroll, and they include federal dollars passing through — Medicaid claims, FEMA money, pandemic aid. But every check the state cuts to a contractor, grantee, or vendor is in there. It's where the spending lives.

The ratchet only turns one way

In fiscal year 2019, Vermont paid vendors $5.0 billion. Then came COVID and the federal money cannon, and payments jumped past $6 billion. Here's the thing: the emergency ended, the federal spigot closed, and the spending never came back down. Fiscal 2026, which closed June 30, set the all-time record — $8.16 billion, up 63 percent from 2019, in a state whose population grew about 3 percent.

We screened every department that spent more than $10 million in 2019 for spending decreases since. We found one: the Department of Labor. Everything else grew, most of it dramatically. Whatever you call that, it isn't a government that ever hands money back.

Where it's going

The state's biggest payee is one continuous relationship wearing four names — EDS, then HP Enterprise Services, then DXC, now Gainwell Technologies — the contractor that processes Vermont's Medicaid claims. Combined take since 2010: roughly $25 billion, including $2.25 billion in fiscal 2026 alone. Most of that is claims money passing through, not contractor profit — but that's precisely the problem. The public checkbook doesn't separate the fee from the pass-through, and the error rates live in audit reports almost nobody reads. Incidentally, the state spells "Gainwell" two different ways under the same vendor number, splitting its own totals. It cannot consistently spell the name of the company it has paid billions.

The growth champions since 2019 tell the rest of the story. The Public Service Department is up 885 percent on broadband buildout grants. Public Safety is up 351 percent, driven by flood recovery money flowing to towns. The Agency of Digital Services — IT contracts and software subscriptions — quadrupled to $105 million a year. And the Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living went from $248 million to $805 million, as pandemic-era home-care rates quietly became permanent.

Then there's the curiosity: a Middlebury law firm whose state receipts went from $730,000 in fiscal 2024 to $19.6 million in fiscal 2026. Drill in and it's not a scandal — the firm handles closings for state land purchases and the flood buyout program, so disaster money flows through its escrow account. But one firm sitting at the money end of a disaster program is worth fair questions: how was it chosen, and what does it charge? That's a records request waiting for an author — the tool writes it in one click.

Now it's your turn

Every number above came from data your government already publishes. The problem was never access — it was that nobody had built the shovel. So we built it.

The Citizens' Checkbook, live now on FYIVT, is a companion to our Spend-O-Meter. Type any name — a company, a nonprofit, your town, your neighbor's excavation outfit — and see every payment the state ever made to them, charted by year. Pick any department and watch its trajectory since 2010. And here's the part we're proudest of: the tool has no database of ours behind it. Your browser queries the State of Vermont's servers directly, live, every time. You are not trusting FYIVT's math. You're reading the state's own books.

When you find something, the tool finishes the job: it drafts a public records request for you, citing the statute that gives every Vermonter that right and the three-business-day clock agencies are on to respond. The State Auditor's fraud form is one click away. So is our tip line.

A big number is a question, not an accusation. But questions are how accountability starts — and Vermont just got 640,000 potential auditors.

The Citizens' Checkbook is free at fyivt.com/vtcheckbook. Found something? editor@fyivt.com.