The substandard world of open state finances

Image source: indianexpress.com/article/business/budget/budget-2016-rs-25k-cr-falls-short-of-psu-banks-hopes

Open data (like all other areas) develops in Russia in a peculiar way: it is difficult to understand and get used to the fact that it is much easier to learn about state revenues and expenditures than about ecology, education, and health care. At the same time, federal and regional departments mainly publish registries of subordinate institutions, lists of current vacancies and addresses of cultural institutions and pharmacies (very “hackneyed” data sets with limited areas of application).

Financial government agencies look at openness much more broadly:

1. The Ministry of Finance regularly publishes data on consolidated budget painting (federal budget expenditures), opens historical budgets, holds contests and meetings for developers.
2. Regional and municipal financial bodies post information about budgets, their projects, reports on budget execution (yes, not always qualitatively, not always in one place, but there are data and they can be used). In figures: approximately 90 regional and 23 000 municipal budgets per year.
3. The federal treasury places registers of subsidies , participants and non-participants in the budget process , data on government contracts . In numbers: the register of participants in the budget process has more than 150 thousand records, the number of records on government contracts is approaching 20 million.
4. A number of other departments, such as the Federal Tax Service , are also starting to take the first steps towards openness. Providing basic data from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities in a machine-readable format and for free is, of course, not planned, but an attempt to find something interesting in their data can still be done.

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In general, the work of government agencies in this direction cannot but rejoice, for which a special thanks to the Ministry of Finance and the Treasury (for PR and data advertising), open to dialogue and the requests of developers. One big problem is that there is no systematic approach in all these activities, as a result of which data is published anywhere (try, for example, to collect the budgets of all the municipalities of St. Petersburg) and in any way (and then examine all these budgets, identify errors and try prove to municipalities that their data is not correct), and their quality leaves much to be desired. Of the obvious points at issue, the following can be highlighted:

Prioritization
Despite the observation of the work of the Ministry of Finance since the announcement of the “ course for openness ” (2012-2013), it still remains a mystery to me to prioritize data disclosure. One of the main motivations for launching this trend in Russia was entering the TOP-5 in the Open Budget Index international ranking. It consists of two indicators: transparency (access to information and data) and the possibility of citizen participation in the budget process. With the second indicator, everything is bad for us (and not only the state, but also the citizens themselves are “guilty”), but we can speculate about the first one.

From the point of view of access to information on expenses and incomes (we do not consider the “machine readability” criterion) - Russia, if not the leader in the world, is in the first three or five for sure: the information is disclosed at the federal, regional, municipal levels. But the choice of arrays for the disclosure raises questions, and if earlier the standard explanation was: “we do not know what you [the developers] need”, now the reference is to the surveys conducted by the Ministry of Finance on the relevance of financial data . The polls listed such interesting data as registers of expenditure commitments, the federal budget, lists of public regulatory obligations and about 30 more points, and as a result published this year there will be data on diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones (it should be noted that 2 3 interesting new sets will still be). For four years I have not met a single Russian or foreign person who would be interested in Russian data about diamonds (oil sales, government contract data, budgets, media financing are asked, and who “voted” for the openness of emeralds remains a mystery to me).

The question of the questionable choice of data for disclosure would not have arisen if the “basic” data had been published, to which, first of all, the federal budget relates (that is, the Law “On the Federal Budget”). This is not only the main indicator for ratings (Open Budget Index, Open Data Barometer ), for which everything was started, but also the main financial document, according to which the state lives and functions. The summary budget list (federal budget expenditures) is published in machine-readable format and updated on the website of the Ministry of Finance, and all other data from the Law On the Federal Budget (revenues, various standards, subsidies, etc.) is not in machine-readable form. The data of the regions and municipalities in the XLS and CSV are published (not by all, but by many), data on contracts and reports on the execution of budgets are also available, but we still have only the federal budget in PDF. Although according to the official position (three times voiced at meetings with developers), “disclosing the Federal Law“ On the federal budget ”does not prevent anything and this will be done.” It is only after the appearance of these data that it’s impossible to say that “even a year has not passed”. Has passed.

Poor data quality
Suppose you are lucky and you have found the necessary data (even doubly lucky - they are not only there, but also machine-readable). The joy of their presence usually does not last long - approximately until the first attempt to understand them: the structure is confusing (I say hello to the “ladder” of the Ministry of Finance, which is of little use both for the programmer and for the “ordinary person”), the documentation is almost always absent. Understanding basic data such as budgets and contracts is possible, but difficult — the Budget Code systematically describing the budget system and the DFF Albums documenting data on government contracts and public procurement are detailed but voluminous and strewn with specific terminology (which certainly reduces the attractiveness of this data for developers). The main problems begin with a detailed examination and attempt to use and compare the data:

1. Official data obtained from the site zakupki.gov.ru , is full of typos in the names of organizations, confusion with the currency (the number of contracts concluded in Australian dollars, we were told in the mailing list of public finances last week), confusion in dimensions (the data are specified in thousands, when they should be indicated in rubles), errors in the TIN (the imagination of individuals when filling in the TIN / KPP fields is unlimited; the logic of representatives of organizations indicating the TIN of the bank instead of the TIN of their organization cannot be explained).
2. With budgets no better. When they are formed and / or published, classifiers are used incorrectly (for example, there are no leading zeros, the digit “0” is replaced by the letter “o”), broken links are used (for example, to other xls files from Masha’s computer from the municipal administration) amounts or incorrect understanding by representatives of municipalities of the subtleties of the Budget System of the Russian Federation (for example, Dvortsovyi Municipalities used the same codes for municipal programs in 2015, which is unacceptable according to the official response of the St. Petersburg Finance Committee).

You can talk more about the quality of the data on the Budget Stories hackathon, which will be held on June 25-26 in St. Petersburg (I was invited to participate in the role of mentor, so I will not hide my personal interest in attracting those with whom you can discuss financial data, their quality and application ideas).

Lack of responsibility and low interest in improving data quality
Correct typos, bring addresses and phone numbers into a single format, labor-intensive, but realizable. It is more difficult to deal with meaningful errors, the elimination of which requires comments from the original source. In the case of municipal data (mainly with budgets) it is doubly difficult - the level of IT literacy and understanding of the specifics of “open data” at the municipal level is objectively lower, the tasks and problems are completely complete without open data. In addition, formally, municipalities are not the third level of government, that is, neither the Ministry of Finance nor the regional government bodies can affect the quality of their data. And, if the problem is not resolved by interacting with the data source, then the next authority is officially the Prosecutor’s Office, referring to which is not a “positive” way to solve the problem and is unlikely to contribute to continuing communication with the municipality (if you plan, for example, to come up with proposals).

With government contracts and other data obtained at zakupki.gov.ru, the situation is similar - in general terms, the Treasury “implemented a warning control on the compliance of information about suppliers specified by the user with the Incorporation / EGRIP”, and in official answers to specific questions with examples of incorrect Data is sent to “personal responsibility borne by the person entitled to act on behalf of the customer.”

Summarizing : there is a lot of data on state finances, they are interesting, not always qualitative and complex. Do you need them? Maybe you already use them? And if not, what reasons stop?

In any case, thanks for the work on openness and, for justice, it should be noted that the Ministry of Finance still has one excuse - they do not have enough requests and feedback on the quality of data from developers. It is clear that it is not particularly convenient to leave official appeals on the website of government agencies (and in the case of the Ministry of Finance, you still need to spend time choosing unobvious categories), but you can write them a letter to opendata@minfin.ru (alone I could not move the call counter to zero), leave a comment on the Facebook page or even mark the “federal budget” and other useful data files in the survey on the relevance of data. By the way, representatives of the Treasury at a meeting with the developers announced that not a single request about the data remains unanswered, will we check? ;-)