How we verify Florida data

Every number on our Florida pages comes from Florida CFO Vendor Payments (myfloridacfo.com), the state's own transparency portal. This page is the standing verification report: what we hold, the quality gates every load must pass, and the reconciliation math against the state's own published totals, including the part that doesn't match.

The chain of custody

Each record travels the same six steps, and every step leaves evidence:

1. The state records a payment in its accounting system.
2. The state publishes it in bulk on Florida CFO Vendor Payments (myfloridacfo.com).
3. We fetch the official bulk file; every fetch is logged with a timestamp, and failures are recorded too.
4. The state's row is archived exactly as received and fingerprinted. The archive is append-only: records are never edited or deleted, even when the state overwrites its own history.
5. Names are normalized with deterministic rules (see methodology); the original name is kept alongside, and quality gates run on every load.
6. Pages are published from a versioned release; the version appears at the foot of every page.

Quality gates

No Florida release goes live unless all four gates pass. Current status:

The reconciliation math, all 17 published fiscal years

Florida's CFO publishes vendor payments as bulk data files. At every fetch we compare the rows we read against what we publish; the counts match exactly across fiscal years 2009 through 2025. Florida's accounting system publishes no statewide spending total on its portal, so the dollar-level comparison uses per-agency anchors instead (see the note below the table).

Here is the comparison against the state's own published figures, to the exact row:

Row counts match exactly and the dollar sums re-derived from our archive are penny-exact against extraction across all 62,260,406 payments. Because the state publishes no portal-visible statewide total, dollar reconciliation is anchored per agency (Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, and the Gaming Control Commission) against figures visible in the state's own tools, within documented tolerances for payment-channel differences; those anchor figures will be added to this page from the recorded reconciliation package.

Known limitations

• Florida masks vendor identification numbers in its published data, so a vendor here is a distinct payee name. The state's accounting system also truncates names at about 31 characters; where a name renders cut off, that is the state's record, not a display error.
• Payments to 2,856,518 individual people are withheld by name using the state's own individual-payee flag; sole proprietors paid under personal taxpayer keys are withheld with them. Their dollars remain in agency totals.
• Mechanism and pool accounts (for example the Medicaid payment clearing account, which alone carries over $300 billion) are accounting constructs, not vendors, and are suppressed from vendor listings; their dollars remain in agency totals.
• Florida is transitioning its accounting system (FLAIR to PALM) around fiscal year 2027; expect a documented era break in the data when the state cuts over.
• Per-agency dollar anchor figures are recorded in the reconciliation package and will appear on this page; the state publishes no statewide total to compare against, and we say so rather than invent one.

Check us yourself

Beyond the automated gates, we verify random individual payments against the CFO's own vendor payments search by payee name, date, and amount. A single mismatch is treated as a stop-the-line event for the source. You can do the same: pick any payment on this site and look it up on the state's own portal by vendor name and date. If the portal disagrees with us, we want to know.

Machine-readable version of this report: /trust/fl/provenance.json. Report content last reviewed Jul 28, 2026.