Budgets and financial statements for US federal and municipal governments already have to be public. If you're talking about the bill of materials and receipts

Budgets and financial statements for US federal and municipal governments already have to be public. If you're talking about the bill of materials and receipts for every individual transaction, there are some pretty serious obstacles to that. At minimum: - The government directly provides medical service via the VA and DoD and disclosing every transaction risks HIPAA violations. - It may not now be illegal, but I think there would be some privacy concerns about things like revealing every person's student loan payments. - Counseling and employee assistance type stuff for government employees can't be made public for the same reasons. - Criminal fines for anyone whose record is later expunged present a hurdle. - Payments to confidential informants in criminal investigations obviously need to stay confidential or you're going to get them murdered. - Witness protection payments same thing. - At least some transactions are classified. - Contract details are kept hidden from other contractors right now to avoid undercutting and collusion. All in all, as long as you're forced into some system where maybe some, even most, transactions can be made on a public ledger, but others have to be kept private, you'll never prevent fraud and/or suspicions of fraud in the form of transactions being kept illegally private. At some point, you have to trust the auditors and Congressional oversight committees.