Yesterday's tax filing deadline may have served as an opportunity to revisit the age-old question: Where are all our tax dollars going?

Many taxpayers may not know that there are already several Web sites that disclose government spending at the federal, state and county levels, as The Advertiser's Jim Dooley recently reported. Still, the sites are limited in information and, at times, cumbersome to navigate.

Sen. Les Ihara Jr. and Rep. Marcus Oshiro have each introduced legislation — SB 1689 and HB 122, respectively — that would create a public Web site listing every entity receiving state financial awards in the form of grants, loans, awards and contracts over $25,000. The bills are modeled after the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act that President Bush rightly signed into law last year.

Already, Hawai'i's State Procurement Office contains a contract awards page on its Web site. But procurements are only a fraction of state monies spent on awards.

The new legislation goes well beyond that information, involving hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the state a year, according to Ihara. The Department of Budget and Finance would be mandated to establish and maintain the Web site, and include information such as the award amount, its recipient and the parent entity of the recipient.

The cost of the site to taxpayers would be minimal. But the bills face opposition by the Department of Budget and Finance over staffing concerns. "It will be an effort to pull this together, but it's all electronic and there's software," said Ihara. But with the massive amount of data it will be dealing with, the department will need support to coordinate and create a system.

The legislation gives the department until July 1, 2008, to establish a pilot program. That's plenty of time to determine what support it needs to create the transparency that our state taxpayers deserve.