User:Eddievega/New York City Independent Budget Office

New York City Independent Budget Office New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO)

The New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) is a publicly funded agency of the City of New York that provides nonpartisan information about the city's budget and local economy to the public and their elected officials. The office has no formal policy-making role.

Role of the Agency

IBO presents budgetary reviews, forecasts of the local economy and city tax revenues, and policy analyses in the form of reports, testimony, memos, letters, and presentations. The agency also produces guides to understanding the budget and provides online access to key revenue and spending data from past years. Because IBO is independent of the mayor, the agency provides an alternative source of budget and tax-related information previously available only from the administration itself. The agency’s publications cover education, public safety, economic development, sanitation, parks, homeless services, and other spending areas. Among them are three legally mandated annual reports: the Fiscal Outlook, which provides a forecast of revenue and spending for the upcoming year; Analysis of the Preliminary Budget, which offers a comprehensive and detailed review of the Mayor’s budget proposals; and the Analysis of the Executive Budget, which highlights changes from the preliminary plan. The agency also publishes Budget Options for New York City, an annual publication that presents dozens of alternatives for decreasing costs and increasing revenues, with arguments for and against each of the options.

Agency History

IBO was created as part of the 1989 Charter Revision which guaranteed the agency at least 10 percent of the funds allotted to the Office of Management and Budget, an agency controlled by the New York mayor. The guaranteed budget came about because a similar office, the Legislative Office of Budget Review, was defunded and abolished one year after having been established. The rationale for the budget guarantee proved prescient in 1998 when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani proposed that the agency be defunded.

The Charter also reinforced the agency’s independence by the procedures it enacted for the selection of the agency’s director. The Charter created the Advisory Board, appointed according to specific provisions set forth in the Charter, that would recommend director nominees to a panel comprised of four elected city officials: the Public Advocate, the Comptroller, a Borough President, and a representative of the City Council. The panel elects the agency head, who serves a four-year term. The Office of the Mayor has no role in the selection of the director.

Since its founding, IBO has developed a reputation for objectivity based largely on its data-driven analytic reports. In its early years, however, several mayors and elected officials contended IBO would only duplicate the efforts of several budget oversight agencies and refused to fund it. After three lawsuits filed by elected officials and good-government groups and favorable court decisions, IBO was finally funded in 1996, and began soon afterward to issue reports. In 2009 state lawmakers expanded IBO’s role to include extended monitoring of the New York City Department of Education and increased its allocation to 12.5 percent of the Mayor’s budget office.