[OpenSpending] Follow-up to transaction standard call

Sat Oct 20 16:23:42 UTC 2012

Good points, Alistair. A few replies in line:

On 2012-10-20, at 11:05 AM, Alistair Turnbull wrote:

> I remember that a big obstacle to getting things from the data was that various government organisations paid each other to do things, so that the same money showed up multiple times. This was particularly true within the NHS. It makes it very difficult to get accurate totals.

How does transaction-level data get around that? Either way, don't you see a disbursement from one account and revenue in another? Or was COINS not publishing revenue, only expenditures?

> To avoid this problem, I think we would need:
> 
> - Transaction-level data.
> 
> - Useful data about the recipients of payments, by which I mean that it should be possible to see if the recipient is another government organisation, and if so which one.

At the transaction level, money moves between accounts, not between organizations. Money can move between accounts owned by the same organization. "Recipient" is therefore at least one level up from accounts (putting aside the question of "beneficial owner"). What data is currently given in COINS?

> I worry that contract-level data would miss a lot of interesting information. Payroll, for example. Also cost overruns, non-performance, disputes, and mismanagement would show up in transaction-level data but not in contract-level data. Many procurement decisions look sensible on paper...

Interesting to bring up payroll, because in many countries that information is protected by privacy laws. In general, transaction-level data raises important privacy concerns, eg employee expenses.

Cost overruns are easy to see even at a high-level. Governments regularly spend more than they budget. There's certainly interest in determining where those cost overruns are at a lower-level, but I don't see the need to go to the lowest level. Same for non-performance.

Certain forms of mismanagement can likely only be seen at the transaction level.

How do you see disputes given only transactions?

> I can see that contract-level data would also add lots of new useful information about the purpose of the transactions. I don't think either of transaction-level data and contract-level data really replaces the other.
> 
> Bulk of data is not in itself an insurmountable problem. We have computers and dedicated people. Given ledger-level transaction data the task of reducing it is manageable, provided the books balance. However, if you get a dumbed-down version of the data that has been processed and reduced and summarised so that it no longer balances, then you don't really have anything at all.

Insurmountability is a very low bar :) I would not underestimate the time it takes to properly model an accounting system, so that it's possible to ask of it the sorts of questions that are interesting.

Anyway, I'm not against transparency at the transaction level. I'm just curious to figure out if the common use cases and requirements can be satisfied without going that far, because I think going for the transaction level will be a lot harder, both in terms of getting the data and in terms of using it.

James