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.

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.

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.

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.

Understanding COINS

Posted: June 17th, 2010 | Author: Lisa Evans | Filed under: Uncategorized, Visualization, Where Does My Money Go | Comments Off

Something amazing has happened since the government spending recorded in the COINS database was made openly available to everyone. I’m talking about the impressive range of free, and in many cases open source, products to display the COINS data.

So far there are COINS search engines from The Guardian and The Open Knowledge Foundation, graphs from Rapid Gate Way and Alpine Interactive and bloggers like Martin Budden have been powering away on their own projects to describe the COINS data. What a triumph for publishing government data. It beats the alternative of using public funds to pay for these tools when the skills and enthusiasm are clearly out there in the community.

coins1

That’s not to say that the products to display the data are complete right now, or that we have understood the COINS data completely. We had a few clues about the structure of the data from previous research, but there is no substitute for having the data itself, and we are still building up our knowledge. But given it’s been just over a week since we first laid eyes on the data, I think it’s fair to say that we are making good progress by most IT project standards.

In this post I want to address two questions that drive our thinking at the Open Knowledge Foundation, since the COINS publication. They are: ‘what’s important in COINS?’ and ‘how do we get meaningful results out of it?’

It has taken some discussion with the exceptionally helpful staff at HM Treasury and reading the COINS Guidance(PDF) and other related materials that make more sense now we can see the data — but finally I feel we have more accurate answers to both of these questions.

What’s important in COINS?

The COINS Guidance lists every field in the version of COINS that was released. One of the big challenges with a big complicated data set, like COINS, is knowing which of these fields are important.

To determine this I’ve spoken with the Treasury team about the fields they consider most useful, and the combination of fields they use most frequently.

The answers I got focused mainly on the central government spending and income data.

The spending and income is described for each central government department which you can see in the ‘Department description‘ field. Each department has a number of programmes that will either require or generate money. The department’s programmes are in the ‘programmes object group description‘ part of COINS, and more detail still is in the ‘programme objects description‘, and yet more detail still is in the ‘account codes‘ which are all listed in Annex B.

The ‘Value‘ field tells the actual spending or income in thousands of pounds. If the number is positive it refers to the departments spending, if negative it refers to the department’s income. It should also be able to check if the amount is spending or income from the ‘account code’.

In addition to the spending programme and ‘account code’ information, there are two further categories in COINS that describe the data very usefully, those are:

‘budget boundary‘. There are three choices for ‘budget boundary’: 1) DEL which stands for Departmental Expenditure Limits. These are items that have been budgeted for 3 years, it is estimated that DEL makes up about 80% of the items in COINS. 2) AME which stands for Annually Managed Expenditure. These are the budget items that are difficult to predict accurately and the risk for these is taken by the Exchequer as a whole. We are ignoring everything in AME where the ‘Programme /admin’ is not set to ‘Other’. 3) ‘not DEL/AME’ is budgeting for arm.s length bodies — we are not too concerned about these budget items.
the ‘resource capital‘. There are two options that are both useful for .resource capital. which are 1) ‘capital’ which is investment and capital assets. 2) ‘resource’ which includes all wages, salaries and operating costs.

There are some parts of COINS that we are less concerned with at the moment.

Other than the expenditure and income data, there are plans and estimates in COINS. You can see plans and estimates that should roughly correspond to the supplementary budget information and the supply estimates, respectively. We have been less concerned with plans and estimates as, by their nature, they will be less detailed than the outturn.

There is a CPID code in COINS which is there for a special project within the Treasury called the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA). This project will ensure that there is no double counting of the money when a transaction occurs between government departments. As I understand it, 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. There are scripts in COINS to ‘best guess’ these subtractions using the CPID code, along with the WGA staff performing lots of checks too, but once this matching has been successful the CPID code is largely redundant.

The Whole of Government Accounts also collects information about spending by local authorities and records this spending in COINS, but this is not in a publishable state. However it is possible to view central government grants for local authorities with the field called ‘Local Government Use only‘.

How do I get meaningful results out of COINS?

On the advice of the Treasury guidance we are focusing on the Fact Table more than the Adjustment Table in COINS. In the fact table the field that defines actual spending and income is the ‘Data_type‘ being set to ‘Outturn’ and ‘Data_subtype‘ being set to ‘approved’ or = submitted_outturn (both of these conditions required).

In addition we can set Budget_Boundary to either DEL or if we require the shorter term budget spending then we set AME and then set programme/admin to ‘Other’.

For the 2009-2010 COINS data we can also set the Resource_capital2: set to Resource (on 2010-11 budgeting basis).

With the COINS data defined this way it is then possible look at the spending programmes and associated account codes certain that the results are actual spending and actual income for the time frame, rather than estimated or planned spending or income.

It is wonderful that the publication of COINS has brought so much innovation in the open software community. It will be even more wonderful if we can continue to develop to make public spending data easier to understand, particularly when so many important decisions are being made that will affect our lives.

COINS: A Users Guide

Posted: June 4th, 2010 | Author: Lisa Evans | Filed under: Uncategorized, Where Does My Money Go | Comments Off

At 0930 BST today the UK government released the COINS database, one of the biggest sources of information on UK public spending. Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock says:

The release of this data marks another milestone in the opening up of public data - in which the UK leads the way. While this is by no means the end of the line, this material is substantially more detailed than anything previously available and is a major advance for transparency of public finances.With our Where Does My Money Go? project we’ve already been working to make spending understandable to the general public and this new data is essential to realizing the project’s goal of showing exactly where each pound of your taxes goes.

Update: for latest info see http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/data/coins/

Lets be honest — it’s basically mystery how our tax money is spent. Like all good mysteries it’s compelling to find the truth behind it.

The publication of the COINS database today will a big step forward in resolving this mystery. COINS, which stands for the Combined Online Information System, is the main database used by HM Treasury for budgeting — and reconciling what actually happened against those budget plans.

Public bodies have a requirement to report their spending to COINS. Each local government body, and this includes all councils (except parish), all local police, local fire, local transport and park authorities, report all items of spending over £1million once a year. The record of this spending is gathered by Communities and Local Government (CLG) and audited before it is entered into COINS as spending from CLG.

Similarly, each central government department has to report spending on all items over £1 million and agreements over £5 million and that they define this spending use their own spending codes for this. Some of these items are well defined in COINS — others less so.

Each of these bodies provide not only their spending once a year, but also estimates of their spending for the year ahead, once a month for every item of spending.

With the publication of COINS we can now see, for the first time all in one place, the spending and estimates for all of these public bodies.

But bringing this all together has a slight problem — there’s lots of accounting jargon that we can cut through here, to understand the great significance and value of this publication.

COINS: A User Guide

Permanent url: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/data/coins/

COINS is a big listing of estimated or actual entries of money.

Each entry in the listing involves a named goverment department’s money.

Some of the entries show a department has bought something like a service or a product. Other entries show a department has recieved some money.

Key features:

Programme objects and Programme object groups: each department creates Programme Objects to which spendings is assigned.
Account types (SCOA = Standard Chart of Government Accounts): standard “accounting-like” classifications of spending. Details of how the money is recieved or spent, so you can choose all spending on Wages & salaries or Current Grants to private sector.
CPID: If money is exchanged between government departments we have a record of which departments were involved. The Counter-party Identifier (CPID) in the entry line is the description of the other department.
Data type: Each of the monthly and yearly budgeting exercises can be identified with the Data Type category. Examples of these are Forecast Outturn March, Forecast Outturn April etc.

The release of the COINs data is a huge step forward for transparency in the UK. We hope that the release of the data will lead to much better public understanding of how public funds are being spent. We’ve been very keen to get hold of the COINS data for our Where Does My Money Go? project and our team are already on the case, working to create intuitive visual representations of the data. If you’d like to follow our progress, you can find us at wheredoesmymoneygo.org or on Twitter at @wdmmg!

UK Government commits to open up new spending data!

Posted: June 2nd, 2010 | Author: Lisa Evans | Filed under: Uncategorized, Where Does My Money Go | Comments Off

It’s exciting times right now for people in the UK interested in how public funds are being used. The new government has proposed to publish unprecedented amounts of spending data in unprecedented detail. In the new Coalition Programme for Government (PDF), the PM has committed to the following, which is very similar to the Conservative pre-election promises but with more detail and — crucially — a schedule!

Historic COINS spending data to be published online in June 2010.

All new central government ICT (information and communication technologies) contracts to be published online from July 2010.

All new central government lender documents for contracts over £10,000 to be published on a single website from September 2010, with this information to be made available to the public free of charge.

New items of central government spending over £25,000 to be published online from November 2010.

All new central government contracts to be published in full from January 2011.

Full information on all DFID international development projects over £500 to be published online from January 2011, including financial information and project documentation.

Local government spending transparency

New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011.

New local government contracts and tender documents for expenditure over £500 to be published in full from January 2011.

Other key government datasets

Crime data to be published at a level that allows the public to see what is happening on their streets from January 2011.

Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants with salaries above £150,000 to be published in June 2010.

Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants and NDPB officials with salaries higher than the lowest permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale to be published from September 2010.

Organograms for central government departments and agencies that include all staff positions to be published in a common format from October 2010.

This is all great news for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Where Does My Money Go? project. In particular we have been researching the COINS database as a rich source of data to visualise. In addition, it is noted that the current standard for reporting central government spending(PDF) is items above £20m in any year by region, so the £25,000 standard seems like a big improvement, hopefully this will also be spending by region.

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:

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.
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.
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”.

Analysing and visualising UK public spending

Where Does My Money Go?