Publishing itemised local authority expenditure

It was publised in this weeks computer weekly about the threshholds for Local Authorities to publish :

Tender related documents on a single website > £10K by Sept 10.

All tenders and new items of spending > £500 by Jan 11.

Is this correct? If so what content and format do we need to comply with and where do we publish the information?

Not sure if the public will be logging in on a regular basis, but it may be useful to show where public money is actually spent.

Is it only me or does anyone else have any issue with this?

Now don't get me wrong I think it is a great idea that public expenditure is able to be scrutenized by the public - but they are talking about including such data as internal spending and finance codes. I think that a lot of care needs to be taken when deciding just how much extra information is included with the actual spending data. Good metadata is crutial but only if it is benificial.

I may be paranoid but my first thought was that including internal codes would make it so much easier for fradulant invoices and payments to be created.

Bobbin

The top five organisations on which the Greater London Authority spent the most money in the month from 1 April to 1 May 2010? Coming right up: they're Heath Lambert Ltd (£253,342), Norland Managed Services Ltd (£99,903), Bow Tie Television (£88,711), Amaze [Europe] Ltd (£73,939), and Rufus Leonard Ltd (£72,024).I'll leave it to other inquiring minds to find out who those companies are and why they were paid those amounts - but the fact that we can see them at all is a result of the new openness of the GLA, the creation of its Datastore (which is also on Twitter as @londondatastore) and the order of the mayor that all expenditure over £1,000 should be itemised and made available to the public.You'll find the full details - in CSV (comma separated variable) or PDF - at its Expenditure over £1,000 web page, which has data going back to April 2008.The format of the CSV files (which are of course the only ones that are even close to being machine-readable) is simply enough: vendor, expense description, amount, document number (of the invoice).

Hello,

  In regards to what data to publish, how are schools involved? Im going to assume its council based spend on schools, rather than that plus what the schools have actually spent as well.

In addition, how are things like purchase card spend catered for? Seeing as P card spend doesnt nomrally have mandatory fileds like invoice number, vendor number et al.

If anyone could shed some light on this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

I do agree that Local Government spending should be published and this should be published in a user friendly form. Such as itemising expenditure subjectively on staff salaries, agency staff, consultants, etc, etc. If the data is published along the lines of the categories in the final accounts used by Local Authorities or according to the BVACOP classifications then little value will added to the publishing of such data since these expenditure categories are far to broad and all encompassing for conclusions or a meaningful analysis to be drawn from the data.

In my view the public should be able to determine whether or not money spent on consultants, for example, could be better used by employing in-house staff at a reduced cost to the Authority, or simply prompt future discussions enabling the Authority to explain it's use of consultants - it may be a short term project requiring certain expertise that is only required for a short period of time and therefore cheaper to employ an external consultant.

Whilst I welcome the publication of local govt expenditure, I am concerned over the number of local authorities who are using the ONS Standard Codes to describe the local authority body. This code is not a reference to the local authority but to the boundary that the local authority happens to govern at a particular point in time. The boundary may change but the corporate body remains the same making them distinct entities and requiring a different URI to the currently published SNAC codes at statistics.data.gov.uk.

There is therefore an immediate requirement to create a codelist to define ALL govenment bodies that would then become a set of URIs to hang subsequent data off. I cannot see at present how any local government expenditure data can be published until this has been achieved.

Continued attempts to use the SNAC codes will create URIs that are not unique and lead to corruption in the data.

I really don't see the need for 'itemised' expenditure and like any business, certain information is not always best understood without due explanation and I can see a lot of time being wasted with public demands of spend justification.  If there were a way to categorize expenditure in a general manner for each authority then the data would still be usable to those who want it without delving too deep.  I know that our care home jobs business requires enough explanation when it comes to expenditure and that to publicise the information could also be misleading to the picture as a whole.

To veryxinyun,

This forum discuss about data and this topic is: Publishing itemised local authority expenditure

Please don't advertise with many link in here.

To topic:

I think it 's not nessescery to publish itemised local authority expenditure, because it will be more complicated problem and not sure to clear about money like we hope