We study the role of institutional quality on the fiscal transparency of a country. We show that such a link does exist even when controlling for endogeneity. Our findings are robust to changes in specification and a host of transparency sub-measures. An advantage of our study is that we use new data on fiscal transparency for a cross-section of 82 countries, which are based on in-depth reports based on a standardized methodology and protocol. Furthermore, the fiscal measures were obtained with the collaboration of government authorities, which makes them particularly reliable.