[OpenSpending] Follow-up to transaction standard call

Wed Oct 24 16:56:57 UTC 2012

I agree - thanks Lucy for bringing it together.

I would agree to handle salaries and employee expenses separately, but with
two provisos:-

(1) the spending transactions should show a total* for salaries and for
employee expenses in the period, so that there is a complete picture of
spending in the period.  Often this is how salaries work through an agency's
systems anyway, with the payroll system just posting a total paid in salary
to the ledger system.  (In some agencies this would include the components
of salary including total basic pay, total bonuses, total allowances, total
pension contribution etc).

(2) singleton contractors and sole traders should not somehow slip through
the net.  The UK Information Commissioner's view is that data about them,
although personal data, is not sensitive personal data if it is data about
their business activities.

* BTW I have been arguing in the UK that where transactions are redacted or
where transactions are below a given reporting threshold then (at least) a
total line should be given for these so that the grand total of the
transaction file(s) is the same as the total expenditure reported by the
agency in its accounts.  This principle is in the local government guidance
but not in the central government equivalent.

Regards

Andrew

From: openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org
[mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of James McKinney
Sent: 24 October 2012 14:30
To: OpenSpending Discussion List
Cc: Alistair Turnbull
Subject: Re: [OpenSpending] Follow-up to transaction standard call

Excellent start, Lucy. With the exception of "How does money move around
inside and outside government?" I think the current list of questions can be
satisfied by an augmented version of the UK's Payments Ontology:
http://data.gov.uk/resources/payments#structure Payments are broader in
precision than transactions, but lower-level and broader in scope than
contracts.

Salaries and employee expenses also came up in the discussion, but I wonder
if these are better handled separately. I can imagine many governments being
more open to transparency around payments than around salaries and expense
accounts. I also expect the questions we'd like to ask of payments to
suppliers are different from those we'd like to ask of payments to
employees.

My suggestion then as we develop the questions/use cases is to focus on
suppliers.

James

On 2012-10-24, at 8:48 AM, Lucy Chambers wrote:

Hi All, 

So, my feeling is that to channel this debate, we need to come back to the
questions people need to be able to answer with the data, I think that
question 2. you indicate, James, is exactly hitting the nail on the head. 

Summarising the discussion from above, trying to put [Question][Why?]. Thank
you Andrew, Gisele and Alastair for providing your input. I've added some
thoughts from my research also:

== What do people want to answer? ==

=== Understanding Internal Government Processes ===

* Who authorised payments?  (Could be useful for: - conflict of interest
tracking, holding officials who made bad decisions to account. )

* What was the date of supply? (to track for instance speed of paying bills,
a big problem for SMEs dealing with many public agencies)

* How does money move around inside and outside government? (Was a
transaction to pay an external company, or was it an inter-departmental
transfer?) <- Qs: is this a means or an end question? Or is this just
something that it is impossible to tell from current transaction data? Is
this the same question as 'In some circumstances it would also be good to
know the source of funding (eg is this general discretionary spending of the
agency concerned, or is it a pass-through payment on behalf of another).'? 

=== Evaluating Choices, Efficiency and Value for Money ===

* What specific goods is it for? (Not just category) (Could be useful for: -
answering questions such as 'how much did government X spend on [computers]
last year. Often, this question is impossible to answer due to different
departments coding identical purchases in different ways. To think about,
how detailed would this get? Would 'Computer equipment' suffice? Or are we
looking for information on thinks such as brand '1000 x MacBook Pro'?'. The
latter I guess is the 'Checkbook' style option, but the former is also
interesting and I know people always want to make calculations such as
these.) 

* What was the location of the work? + What was the location that
benefitted? (Very important question, both inside and outside government, I
would say, to measure impact and efficiency) 

* To highlight cost overruns (Q. Presume this means comparing amount
budgeted and amount actually spent?)

* To highlight disputes, and mismanagement (Q. Agree interesting, but how
would you see this, either in transactions or contracts?)

=== Information on Suppliers ===

* Which supplier was involved? (This is presumably the same issue as
highlighting non-performance, but also things like whether a particular
supplier is getting a large proportion of the contracts, maybe even good
performance, so you can see who should be getting the contracts again?)

* What were the terms of the contract? (For this you would need links to the
contract documentation, presumably) 

My suggestion would be to keep working on this list of questions, and we can
build on the discussion from there, working out what kind of information is
contained in which source. 

Does that make sense? Please let me know if I have missed / misinterpreted
anything!

Lucy 

-- 
Lucy Chambers 
Project Coordinator, 

School of Data <http://schoolofdata.org/>  & OpenSpending
<http://openspending.org/> 
Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/>  
Skype: lucyfediachambers

Twitter: @lucyfedia <https://twitter.com/#!/lucyfedia> 

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