[wdmmg-discuss] Meeting at the Treasury part 1.

Sat Feb 6 17:30:59 UTC 2010

The good news is that people I met at the Treasury agreed to me recording 
the whole meeting. So I have an audio file of the meeting if you are 
interested.

The three guys I meet were very helpful and I can go to them with my data 
requests now rather than waiting 20 days for FOI requests.

Here are the main facts I found out for COINS, I will send a separate 
email for the things I discovered about the CRA.

COINS
=====
COINS is a Camelot database 
(http://www.camelotsoftware.com/camelotkb/questions/13/ maybe?)

COINS produces 4 data sets:
- The budging framework
- The national accounts
- parliamentary estimates framework
- The whole of government accounts - LG, CG

Guides to COINS are in:
- consolidated budgeting guidance -- explains how budgeting works
- estimates manual - explains how estimates work
- PESA - guide to PESA
- FREM - guidebook for resource accounts

No consolidated guide book to COINS.

COINS has no regional spending data other than the CRA.
COINS has no income data, that is held with the HMRC - even though COINS 
has field headings -- the are not populated.

Each government department has its own accounting system
They have to produce resource accounts by FREM using any system they like, 
mostly Oracle and SAP and some adapted versions of COINS.

Other
====
The 'whole of Government accounts' is a big project to get a complete 
report on the Central Gov and Local Gov spending. It is planned for a 
couple of years time.

The Blue Book is mostly spending data from the Treasury and TES 
aggregates should be the same or very similar to the Blue Book aggregates.

Lisa