Netherlands: “Major Open Data Milestone: Budgets and Spending of all Dutch Local Governments Disclosed Online”

From The Open State Foundation:

With openspending.nl – developed by Open State Foundation – now more than 15,000 financial reports are visible and comparable by population, households and area. Various benchmarks can be made making it possible to gain insight into the public spending of hundreds of local governments in The Netherlands.
‘This is an important milestone for open spending. With the availability of these reports as open data on such a scale, the Netherlands leads the world on local open spending’, says Arjan El Fassed, director of Open State Foundation. ‘Open data of public finances offer local and regional council members, journalists and citizens more opportunities to understand how governments spend public money’.
The data is structured around the so-called iv3-standard. In 2013, Open State Foundation started with unlocking the budget and expenses of the Amsterdam Central District. In 2014, supported by the Dutch Ministry of Interior, Open State Foundation started to request all municipalities, provinces and regional water boards to share their financial data, annual and quarterly budgets and spending. Within a year, more than 200 local and regional governments responded positively.
This made eventually the Central Bureau of Statistics to decide to share the raw data from iv3-reports, budgets and quarterly and annual financial statements of all municipalities, provinces and water boards as open data and automatically disclose future deliveries.
For the first time also the financial reports of common arrangements and partnerships between different government authorities in the areas of safety, administration, waste and environment. Until today, many elected representatives have been side-lined when it comes to transparency and monitoring such arrangements.

Read the Complete Announcement
Hat Tip and Thanks: ePSI Platform

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