Improving the accessibility of government's data and information about the public finances
This report shares lessons learned from Scotland's work to improve public finance transparency, including trialling a fiscal portal, enhancing budget accessibility, and identifying what's needed to make fiscal data more open and reusable for all.
Understanding the problem
An issue we have consistently heard is the difficulty users of the government’s fiscal information have in following the story of the public finances over time and being able to ‘follow the money’ from the budget to the outcome it achieves. This feedback has ranged from those with detailed knowledge of the public finances needing more open, accessible and reusable data to support their scrutiny of government’s fiscal decisions over time, to those with less knowledge needing greater explanation of what the data means. Through the international dimension of OGP we learnt from other countries, such as Mexico, Georgia and others how working with civil society more transparency of public finance could be achieved.
We decided to see if there was more we could do to address the problem. As part of Scotland’s second Open Government National Action Plan, in 2021 we undertook a research exercise with internal and external users of the government’s fiscal information, to understand the problems in more detail and to see what might be done about them. The resulting Fiscal Transparency Discovery Report[1] confirmed that the presentation of the government’s fiscal information was not easily accessible or presented in a way that meets most users’ needs. It also identified potential benefits and goals of improved fiscal transparency services, and examples of the platforms which could be used to achieve them, and which were used by other countries, such as digital portals.