Iowa Pandemic Recovery Report

Organization Profile

• Population: 3.2 million
• Tyler Client Since: 2020
• Tyler Products/Solutions: Enterprise Data Platform

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Challenges

When the State of Iowa received more than $10.79 billion in funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in 2020, state officials worked quickly to get those dollars into the hands of Iowa individuals, nonprofits, and businesses in need. As these activities unfolded, Iowa needed to show the public how much the state had been awarded, where those dollars were going, and how the funds were being expended.

Solution

In partnership with Tyler Technologies, Iowa state agencies worked together to create the web-based Pandemic Recovery Report. Built using Tyler Enterprise Data Platform, this searchable and interactive site enables legislators, elected officials, and the public to access and filter detailed financial information about CARES Act aid funneling into the state.

 

Results

Iowa’s Pandemic Recovery Report site is based on multiple datasets representing how state officials want to track and report federal funds used for COVID-19 response and recovery. These datasets include information on state agencies, federal assistance listings, federal funds awarded, state receipts and expenditures, and subrecipient and vendor payments.

From those contextualized datasets, specific queries produce dynamic visualizations and charts that site users can view and filter. Flyout labels show the name and address, federal program, state agency, total award (if available), award description (if available), total payments, and dates of first and last payments made. Overall, the site provides visibility to payments sent to nearly 16,000 schools, nonprofits, and businesses across the state. This makes it easy for residents to explore federal funding awarded and expended by the state and understand the purpose of that funding.

Conclusion

Throughout the creation of its Pandemic Recovery Report, Iowa worked with Tyler to build on its data-first strategy strategically and honor its commitment to government transparency. Built on Tyler’s secure, cloud-based Enterprise Data Platform, the Pandemic Recovery Report enables Iowa government staff to take data from several agency systems, automate its flow to the cloud, organize it uniformly, and turn it into an always-on service for data reuse downstream. This provides an interactive, dynamic, ever-changing platform that can be updated in real-time. Furthermore, it contributes to an overall increase in government transparency, enabling Iowans to quickly access and filter to-date spending data for awarded COVID-19 relief funds.