Where, in the country, is our tax money used?

Posted: August 25th, 2010 | Author: lisa | Filed under: Where Does My Money Go | No Comments »

One of the aims of ‘where does my money go?’ is to follow the path of our money from the point it is handed to the government as tax, to the point it leaves their hands to give benefit to something or someone somewhere in the world.

It is the ’somewhere’ we’ve been looking into recently — we’ve been investigating the stage where the money leaves the government hands, who benefits and in what way?

The Treasury devoted some resource to answering this exact question.

The Treasury Data

The data set the Treasury have is called the Country Regional Analysis (CRA). We’ve collected all years of this report back to 2005 in a CKAN package.

How the data is gathered

Every year the Treasury gather the CRA data by giving each central government department a spreadsheet. There is an example CRA spreadsheet on the CRA page.

You can see that the Treasury fill the spreadsheet with the department’s spending codes (programme object group) from COINS. The department is then asked to work out which regions, in the country, benefited from each of their spending codes.

The regions are quite crude, the whole of England is split into 9 regions and then there is the option of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

There is also an option for everyone in the world befits, this is called Non-ID.

Some of the ways of tracing the funds are easy, say, if there is a spending code for a local initiative that people from only one region are entitled to.

A more complex analysis would be something like if there is a spending code for a museum that people travel from all over the country to see, then a statistician is called upon, and they will determine which parts of the country benefit from this service, probably based on visitor surveys etc.

How to get something useful out of the CRA

The 2009 CRA data had lots of inconsistent use of classification of the spending. The classification of spending used in the CRA is the the United Nations system called Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG). In CRA 2009 some items of spending has only one level of detail in COFOG and most other lines had two levels of detail of COFOG. To be consistent we attempted to get all lines of spending to have the most detailed level of spending. We wrote scripts to fix many of these problems.

The 2010 CRA is much better but still requires some work. The 2010 CRA comes in two sets. Both sets describe the same spending, it is just one (called table 9) describes the areas the money was spent in more detail, and the other data set (called table 10) describes the type of spending in more detail.

Table 9 and 10 have to following fields in common:

• Department code
• Department name
• COFOG level 1
• HMT Functional Classification
• Programme Object Groups
• Programme Object Group alias
• ID and non ID
• CAP or CUR
• spending for dates 2004-05 to 2009-10

when we find a match between table 9 data and table 10 data for the fields above then we need to give it:

the NUTS 1 region code and spending for 2010-11 from table 9

and the ‘CG LG or PC’, COFOG 2 and HMT subfunction class from value from table 10

Then the full detail of the spending in one line.

When this join is done, there is one more problem to fix with the data. This issue all stems from the fact that local authorities do not have programme object groups.

We think the best solution is to replace the ‘dummy sprog …’ programme object group that is used in the CRA for local authority spending, with something like ‘Local Authority Spending’ rather than using ‘Unknown’.

What we have done with the CRA

We, at ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ have used the Treasury’s data for this display: But I’m sure there are many more uses to be had.

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Keeping track of the spending cuts

Posted: August 25th, 2010 | Author: lisa | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

I’ve changed the way you can let the ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ team know about a spending cut.

It’s really easy now, you just need to paste in the url of a place the cut is reported … and that’s it!

You can add more details about the cut on the next page of the form, but it is not required as we will do the rest.

Also I made a spreadsheet of all the Tax Payers Allience proposed £50 billion spending cuts.

Would be really interested to see how these suggested cuts compare with what’s happening in reality, and also the suggested cuts of, say, the IFS.

Please contact us if you want to help with those comparisons.

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How much does our energy cost?

Posted: August 4th, 2010 | Author: lisa | Filed under: Visualization, Where Does My Money Go | 1 Comment »

A big part of my motivation for working on the ‘Where Does My Money Go?‘ (WDMMG) project was to learn more about the cost of the UKs energy system and the cost of mitigating climate change.

What interests me about the climate change issue are the two competing requirements: on the one hand we have to provide affordable energy to meet an increasing energy demand as the population grows, on the other hand we have to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions (by 80% on 1990 levels by 2050) as set in the 2008 Climate Change Act.

The competition arises from the fact that the technologies that tend to emit carbon in the greatest levels are currently the most affordable and cost effective.

Unless there is a dramatic improvement in the cost effectiveness of low carbon energy sources or a dramatic reduction in the energy used then requirement 1 and 2 will conflict to a greater and greater degree in the next 40 years.

I’m not the only one who sees trouble ahead.

Last week the Department for Energy and Climate Change presented the public with an open source tool, which aims to show the effect of tweaking the supply and demand aspects of our energy system, and the effects this will have on our carbon emissions.

The tool is a carbon calculator that looks like this:

Once you have tweaked to get Britain the right carbon reduction and energy supply for 2050, and your happy with the results, there is a public consultation you can complete to let the government know.

The tool shows what is physically possible.

It does not show, within what is physically possible, what is economically possible. That is the next step.

I’ve been doing some research into the cost of energy systems.

I’d been looking for good, detailed data on how much the government spends on our current energy infrastructure, and since working on WDMMG I’ve found, pretty much, what I was looking for. I learnt about the Country Regional Analysis that HM Treasury publishes yearly to show the parts of the country that have benefit from UK public spending.

I took the Country Regional Analysis report and I’ve separated out all the codes that impact on our energy infrastructure and carbon emissions and their associated costs for 2008/09.

You can see the results of my investigation at my Many Eyes account.

I’m being quite careful about the summing these costs, as some of the figures are negative, which I believe means that they are income generating. But more research is required on this.

I have also been requesting the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s spending on different energy sources. So far you can see that for 2008/09 I’m getting a cost of £26 million, in total.

I’ll be writing a follow up post to this one, when I have a display of these Department of Energy and Climate Change costs.

I hope that calculating the costs of our current energy system will form a good baseline for discussions about the cost of our energy system leading up to 2050.

If you would like to work on this project with me then please add your details to our get involved page.

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HMRC are, at their option, exempt from freedom of information law.

Posted: July 16th, 2010 | Author: lisa | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

An important part of the Where Does My Money Go? project is to gather more information about our taxes.

I thought the obvious place to look for that kind of information is HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), so, I explored their website. I found:

• A nice section on the HMRC annual reports. These reports gave a very high level breakdown of our national income, which I copied into this CKAN package.
• A nice selection of National Statistics on the tax gathered. Those national statistics give a pretty good overview of the different types of tax paid in different regions, by different genders for a number of different years.

But I wanted to find out more. I wanted to know how they store the tax data and in how much detail, but I couldn’t find any of this on their website.

I knew that HMRC have a contract, called the Aspire contract, with Capgemini to manage all of the countries tax data. I thought a good way to understand the way tax is stored is to understand what Capgemini do for HMRC.

My friend Francis Irving (who works for MySociety) had made a request for the Aspire contract which was rejected.

This is fair enough, we thought, it was a big request, the Aspire contract is probably the size of a lawyers table. So we tried to construct better requests for information. I asked for the performance targets for Capgemini and that was refused.

So this refinement of request followed by rejection of request was a pattern that continued until Francis had a revelation.

Francis explains:

For a while the idea has been in my mind that the statements of Government bank accounts would, ultimately, be an excellent way to get detailed public sector spending information. Recently I heard about the Government Banking Service, and so made an FOI request from HMRC for the most basic of information – a list of which bodies hold accounts using it. This is the response I got. They give several exemptions that only apply to some accounts, but one odd exemption that applies to all the information that I requested. This is section 18(1) of the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005 (CRCA) (via section 44 (another act prohibits disclosure) of the FOI act): “Revenue and Customs officials may not disclose information which is held by the Revenue and Customs in connection with a function of the Revenue and Customs.” This seems to be a “nuclear option” which lets HMRC refuse any FOI request. No ICO complaint has ever won on this one – here’s a list of them that WhatDoTheyKnow volunteers have been keeping. Further investigation reveals that CRCA Section 20 does allow for limited public interest disclosure to various bodies (e.g. police, intelligence bodies, health & safety etc), but to get it published for any other reason you have to get the Treasury to issue a relevant Statutory Instrument. This is problematic, as it means FOI potentially provides no scrutiny of how our tax is collected.

So there we have it! A mystery solved, at least we know where we stand with HMRC. I’ve booked an appointment to see my local MP about this situation.

Thank you to Francis and the “What Do They Know?” volunteers, particularly Alex Skene, for shedding light on this situation.

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Reporting council spending: a taste of things to come

Posted: July 13th, 2010 | Author: lisa | Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

I met a couple of people from the finance team at Cambridge City Council (CCC) this week.

This meeting makes me want to beam a message out to all councils saying:

“if you publish your data in machine readable form, you pretty much don’t have to worry about presenting this data — there is already a community who will do it all for you for FREE. Everyone wins!“

The outcomes of the meeting where:

• They’re going to give me a copy of their accounts in a spreadsheet.
• They refused to give me an export of their Oracle “Balance Sheet” report.
• All council budgets are published in excel
• They’re going to report their £500 + spending before the Jan 2010.
• When they publish they’re going to make sure their data meets the open data standards defined by Chris Taggart.

Here is some more detail about the meeting for those interested.

Background: I’ve been asking to meet with the finance team in CCC for months. The first thing I did was write to them to request a meeting to explain ‘where does my money go?‘ and get some idea of their finance data. I didn’t hear back so I asked again. Nothing back. So I sent a freedom of information request for the database type, schema and training notes all of which I duly received.

Then I asked for the data, and one of the councilors at CCC saw my request on What Do They Know? and helped me by giving the exact tables that I needed and he also suggested a report to ask for. I asked for all of this and added that I would like to meet as I appreciate it is a big ask.

I didn’t get the data but I did get a meeting.

The meeting: I explained the ‘where does my money go?‘ project. I explained the work the open data community have been doing to clearly show the COINS data, and the amazing progress that was made in a very short time by the treasury giving COINS data in a usable format. I’ve written about this amazing progress before at the beginning of this article for the data.gov.uk blog.

They explained about their current work reporting all spending above £500.

They said that the vast majority of their spending data is below £500, but even so this still is more data than they have every shared before.

They plan to share their data before the Jan 2010 deadline and they are concerned about if the public will be able to interpret it and also how to physically host this large amount data.

I pointed out the open data standards from Chris Taggart and co and how there is a community of people eager to do the work of communicating the spending to the public, and making the data useable will allow them to do this.

They said they would send me a copy of their online accounts in a spreadsheet as this is what they have to convert into a pdf before they put it on their website.

They refused to give any exports of their reports of which there are a number describing in the training notes.

I offered our support for publishing their spending data and they agreed that keeping the lines of communication open with OKFN would be useful to us both.

They were keen to look up Chris’ blog post and the open data standards and said they would make sure they published their data following those guidelines.

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The whole of government accounts: an exercise in elimination

Posted: July 7th, 2010 | Author: lisa | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

When the large sample of COINS data was published on the 4th June it was accompanied by a guide to the data. The guide is very useful, but one thing it doesn’t explain in very much detail is where the COINS data comes from. The guide lists the inputs:

COINS – the Combined On-line Information System – is used by the Treasury to collect financial data from across the public sector to support fiscal management, the production of Parliamentary Supply Estimates and public expenditure statistics, the preparation of Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) and to meet data requirements of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

But in what form are each of these different types of financial data  entered into COINS? To answer this question for the Whole Of Government Accounts (WGA) data, I’ve been looking more closely at the data gathered for this exercise.

After reading the WGA materials on the Treasury and the Communities and Local Government web pages, and chatting to some very helpful members of the WGA team, my understanding of the WGA exercise is that it identifies exchanges of funds between public bodies. These exchanges include the flow of funds from Central Government bodies down to Local Authorities and all the exchanges of funds between departments. When the transactions between public bodies are identified, the WGA exercise makes some adjustments to avoid double counting the money. So, if body A gives money to body B, then WGA would be responsible for subtracting the amount body B received from body A’s total.

As we know the COINS data is made up of spending or income records for each department. In these department records there is a Counter Party ID (CPID),  if that identifies another government department that means that some funds have been exchanged between the two departments.

There are scripts used on the COINS data to look for  eliminations using the CPID code.  which has the code in every department’s spending, if money of the public body money was exchanged with and the WGA team perform lots of checks on this. You can see this process happening in the adjustments table in COINS.

There are two guides to the WGA, one for  local authorities and the other for central government departments.

Central Government Accounts

The process of WGA for Central Government departments is simply that each central government department is required to fill in a C-Pack once a year, which is a spreadsheet constructed by the WGA team.

Point2.4. of the Guide for the C-Pack (PDF) says:

The key deliverable is the C-Pack, and the upload of Resource Accounts data and CPID data into COINS.

Local Authority Accounts

The WGA process for Local Authorities is a slightly different exercise. The Local Authority is asked by WGA to fill in an L-Pack once a year.  If you follow that link to the L-Pack excel spreadsheet that the Communities and Local Government branch of WGA prepare, they you will see that it is quite a complex looking creature. I’m going on a training course to understand it better, but I do know that the results of every local authority filling out this form amounts to quite a significant documentation of public spending and income.

In fact the WAG guide for local authorities states:

Local government controls over 50% of public sector fixed assets, accounts for about 25% of net public expenditure and represents 10% of UK GDP.

Now, here is the interesting part. The Local Authority spending and income that is recorded in the L-Pack is not in the COINS data that was published recently.

Now, I thought this missing detail in COINS might be because the WGA would be published separately.

There is a WGA report expected in spring 2011, but on further investigation it transpires that the level of detail will be the same as company accounts. We will get some extra details in this report, for example spending on PFIs will be included for the first time. But essentially we will miss out on all the lovely detail from the L-packs and C-packs.

The Auditing

Auditing, I believe in the context of WGA, means matching up buyers and providers:

A perfect match is: Barnet Council purchases £5.5 m from Enfield Council. Enfield Concil sales £5.5 m to Barnet Council.

The COINS scripts would eliminate this to zero as perfect match.

Another example: Barnet Council purchases £5.0 m from Enfield Council. Enfield Council sales £5.5 m to Barnet Council. COINS would eliminate 5.0m and and put 0.5M into suspense. The the suspense needs to be investigated more to see where the mistake is. This investigation is the job of the Whole of Government’s Account team. You can set a tolerance in COINS, which is the extent of the difference between two accounts it will put into suspense. The tolerance was set to 5.0m for 2008/09 accounts. I will be set to 1.0m for 2009/10 accounts.

Conclusion

The WAG is an exercise in eliminating excess data that clouds the picture of public spending and income.  The WAG team’s work seem to keep process of reporting spending and income more manageable. This is completely understandable. But on the other hand it would be great to have this detail of exchanges of funds so we can understand public spending as it really is.

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Update on local spending, HMRC Aspire contract and more COINS.

Posted: May 26th, 2010 | Author: lisa | Filed under: Uncategorized, Where Does My Money Go | No Comments »

Here are three updates on requests about public spending, made recently:

1. I’ve been asking for more detail on the way local council accounts are held at Cambridge City Council, Warwickshire County Council, East Cambridgeshire District Council and Huntingdonshire District Council. I picked Cambridgeshire based councils because I live there, and Warwickshire County Council because they have a new open data website. You may also remember that I asked for Cambridgeshire County Council’s accounts database schema, well I’ve now asked for the data with a few examples of reasonable redactions. I’ve been updating.  I’ve started a spreadsheet with all the requests I’ve made of local councils and the types of request. I hope that other people will contribute to this spreadsheet with details and requests for their local authority.
2. Francis Irving had his request for a copy of the Aspire contract rejected. The Aspire contract is the agreement that HM Revenue and Customs made to outsource most, maybe all, of its IT services to Capgemini. Francis was told to be more specific in his request. Included with the rejection letter was some further reading on the Aspire contract. I’ve been working my way through this and trying to make some specific, and hopefully useful, requests for information. I’ve asked for more details about how Capgemini’s performance is being measured. Let’s see how that goes.
3. There have been some more requests for bits of the COINS database from Julian Todd who is now appealing his request for 23 complete COINS records and from Francis Irving who has read the COINS training materials (PDF) and consequently asks for the COINS fact table.

To end I’ll just add this Wordle that I made by pasting into Wordle.com all the text in the COINS training materials I received:

It says it all really: “redacted data” and “Screen-shot exempt”.

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