Accomplishments

Kim’s mission has been to advance accountability, continuity and efficiency in the state’s financial operations. She has accomplished a lot for Nevada in her first term as State Controller.

-         Eliminating waste: Kim exposed overpriced contracts to outside consultants and continues to audit contracts to keep the state from getting ripped off. Kim is working with departments to do Operational Audits to identify where administration is too top heavy. Kim is also implementing XBRL technology that will greatly improve efficiency. (See “Bringing Nevada’s financial system into the 21^st century” below.)

-         Improving transparency: Kim has increased the transparency of the state’s finances with new, more useful and understandable reports. Because most citizens are not accountants or financial professionals, Kim developed a simple four-page Citizen Centric Annual Financial Report (CCR). This report is written in plain language so that all of our citizens can have a basic understanding our state’s finances. This report is distributed to universities, schools, libraries and senior centers. All reports are easily accessible on the State Controller’s website.

-         Finding money for Nevada:  In previous years, the State was only collecting 4 - 11% of the debts owed to the State. Kim has increased that to 28% and is not finished yet. She has proposed a bill to begin Financial Data Matching in Nevada- a process that other states have used to find millions in lost revenues.

-         Protecting the state’s finances: When Kim entered office, the state was vulnerable to the loss of financial data and the ability to function if a disaster struck the State Capitol. Kim established a fully operational disaster recovery site in Las Vegas for our statewide accounting system to protect the state’s financial records and allows continued operations in the event of a serious emergency. The state Information Technology Office proposed to do this job for $1.1 million in two years. Kim’s office did the project for only $550,000 - and was finished in six months! Saving Nevada taxpayers over a half a million dollars.

-         Bringing Nevada’s financial system into the 21^st century- Kim’s proactive vision and knowledge of the latest business technologies will make Nevada the leader among the states for efficiency and transparency. Nevada is the first state in the nation to implement a technology called XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) that could eliminate thousands of hours of labor, set a new level of transparency and speed up operations. Kim negotiated for a free pilot program to prove XBRL’s value in government. (XBRL is a tried and true technology in international finance and is the standard in several countries, but state and local governments in the US have not used this before now.)  XBRL should be operational in Debt Collections by the end of this year. Because XBRL is an “open source” solution, the state of Nevada will own the technology itself and will not be locked into an expensive contract with a single provider. If XBRL is integrated into all state’s systems, the savings could be in the millions of dollars.

-         Being Independent – Kim has provided non-partisan checks and balances to protect taxpayer dollars.

For more information about XBRL in Nevada and other projects in the Controller’s office, visit the Nevada State Controller’s website: http://controller.nv.gov/