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

[Lisa Evans]

On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> Great work Lisa!
>
> On 6 February 2010 17:30, Lisa Evans <lisa.evans at okfn.org> wrote:
> [...]
>
>> 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.
>
> So how fine-grained does it go at the national government level? Any
> examples of the lowest level stuff it has?

It goes down to program objects. I will cover what these are in the CRA 
email.

>> 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.
>
> Wow, it's a real zoo of systems out there :)

Yes, and levels of detail, it is up to the department how much detail they 
record beyond the minimum standards. You can see how much and how well 
different departments record detail from the CRA database.

>> 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.
>
> So we may actually have something better than they have before them ;)

Yes, on the website it says the Whole of Government Accounts is due this 
year, but Ben Pearce, who I met on Friday, said it was more likely to be 
two years away.