[wdmmg-discuss] How much does the UK government pay OKFN?

Sat Jul 9 14:44:54 UTC 2011

Can't say whether the figure is accurate, but re the debt issue, the payment
data published by central and local government is for payments made in a
particular month (whenever they were incurred), and so are on a cash basis.

The budgets/accounts are on an accrual basis (though I understand that in
the past government accounts were done on a cash basis). This is one of the
(many) reasons why comparison of spending by category is pretty useless, and
why we've not bothered trying to use them for that on OpenlyLocal – for that
the place to look are the accounts/budgets.

Chris

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On 9 July 2011 15:38, William Waites <ww at styx.org> wrote:

>
> http://openspending.org/dataset/ukdepartments/entries?filter-to.label_facet=OPEN+KNOWLEDGE+FOUNDATION+LIMITED
>
> About 70k. Given the amount of work OKF has done on data.gov.uk and
> the UK location programme this number seems very surprisingly low.
>
> The possibilities are:
>
>  - That actually is the correct number
>  - The data and / or query on UK government spending is
>    inaccurate or incomplete
>  - That OKF holds a significant amount of UK government
>    debt
>
> Would be curious to know which is the case.
>
> If the latter is the case this throws a very big question on all of
> the published spending data. Accounting is usually done on an accrual
> basis not a cash basis. In my country only farmers are allowed to use
> cash accounting and only then if their income is below a certain
> level.
>
> So by financing its operations with debt either by delaying payment of
> invoices or explicitly structuring working arrangements in a suitable
> way, economic activity can be kept off the published ledgers, at least
> for a certain period of time. This seriously distorts the financial
> picture of the UK government.
>
> If the data is incomplete or inaccurate, why bother publishing it at
> all? In that case it is just misleading.
>
> If the 70k number is correct, then I'm just surprised :)
>
> -w
> --
> William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
> http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww at styx.org>
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