[okfn-discuss] RFI: OKF accounts with the UK government

Thu Jul 21 13:19:17 UTC 2011

* [2011-07-21 12:49:00 +0100] Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> écrit:

> I am in favour of openness of information of this sort.
> 
> Is this the first of its kind? Because if so I suggest a few amendments.
> 
> If it is responsive (as in this case) then every request will come to the
> list and I think a large number of attached documents will simply clutter
> mailboxes. (I have asked several FOIs and I have much appreciated
> WhatDoTheyKnow as a way of managing a single instance of the correspondence.

Hi Peter, I agree that as a general rule cluttering up the mailing
list with attachments is not a good policy. There has been some
discussion of OKF actually using OpenSpending to publish this sort of
information as a matter of course.

In this instance, I wanted to ask the question in a public forum to
have some data that could be used to judge the accuracy of the UK
government 25k spending reports. Using the list was just for
expediency and this is a one-off request.

Thank you very much, Jason for the very prompt response!

A very brief look at the COI account does not look good in terms of
the accuracy of government department reporting - and I would have
thought that the COI would be one of the better ones. Indeed I can't
see any obvious way of matching even the two transactions that thye
have reported with the numbers from OKF (which I would tend to trust).

Curioser and curioser...

Cheers,
-w
-- 
William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww at styx.org>
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