Open Contracting, Budgets and Spend Linking data to unblock budget execution

Objective Public contracting forms part of a wider landscape of public financial management. How can connections be made between budget, contracting and spend data, to give a clearer picture of how public resources are being used? OCDS 1.1 includes basic fields for relating a contracting process to a single budget line, requiring a stable identifier to be available for the budget line from a third-party dataset. Over 2017, and number of OCDS publishers undertook pilot work to include more detailed budget data within their OCDS data, aiming to provide information to users on how a contracting process fits within the wider budgetary process, and to provide information on budget execution related to a particular contracting process or control. A ‘budget breakdown’ extension for OCDS offers the ability to represent the connection between a contracting process and budgets from more than one agency, or for more than one year, but does not provide the full ability to indicate the budget classifications related to an allocation. At the 2017 Open Contracting Global conference, improving linkages between budgets, contracting and spend emerged as a key theme: grounding a renewed focus in the Open Contracting community on coming up with revised extensions. Over the first half of 2018, we’ve undertaken detailed research to understand how to best join up data on contracting, budgets and spend, producing a detailed working paper, and summarising the findings in this slide deck.

What information and functionalities to people need? Identifying budget sources As a journalist I want to see the budget source of a particular contracting process in order to understand whether funding has come from domestic resources, loans or other international revenue Confirming budget allocations As a potential supplier I want to see when budget availability is confirmed for a given contracting process so that I can plan a pipeline of potential bidding opportunities. Tracking the payment process As an academic I want to identify the gap between invoice date and payment date so that I can analyse how prices are affected by payment timelines Identifying projects As a civil society organisation focussed on infrastructure I want to find all the contracting processes related to a given infrastructure programme or project so that I can carry out a review of compliance with infrastructure project transparency requirements. Tracking budget execution As a treasury official I want to share information on the status of budget allocations and spending for any given contract so that I can demonstrate to the public that the budget is being spent in accordance with approved plans To guide our development of an updated extension to OCDS, we looked at 11 user stories under 5 headings. Examples for each are given on this slide. From these we identified requirements that our proposed solution should be able to address.

Open Contracting Data Standard Open Fiscal Data Package What tools do we have? Open Contracting Data Standard Open Fiscal Data Package To guide our development of an updated extension to OCDS, we looked at 11 user stories under 5 headings. Examples for each are given on this slide. From these we identified requirements that our proposed solution should be able to address.

About Open Contracting Data Standard OCDS is: A standard for (1) what to publish about the planning, procurement and implementation of public contracts and (2) how to publish it as open data. Focussing on what users need A data schema for published data Ensuring the technical interoperability of data Collected guidance on publishing and using data Ensuring technical interoperability

About the Fiscal Data Package Fiscal data package is “a lightweight and user-oriented format for publishing and consuming fiscal data” Annotation of existing published datasets in order to transform to a common logical model with spreadsheet columns related to fiscal concepts.

Key concepts National budget data describes allocations of money to particular agencies, projects and functions. A contracting process may have some or all of a particular budget line allocated to it. Within the contracting process, budget means budget allocated for this process. To start, it is important to understand the budget process and the contracting process as operating on different timescales, and at different levels. It is also important to recognise that public financial management practice varies between countries and regions, and so we have to be careful not to make assumptions that cannot be generalised. In this diagram you can see an example of a budget line, consisting of a number of dimensions that classify the budget line, and a number of measures that represent different moments in the life cycle of the budget, and different concepts in terms of budget allocated, executed and paid. A budget line like this is more accurately thought of as an analysis of the budget: where dimensions through which the budget should be aggregated and displayed have been chosen. In the next diagram you can see a contracting process. In this simplified example, we show how an overall allocation of $1m to the Ministry of Finance might be spit into sub-allocations for particular contracting processes. The contracting process budget is the amount allocated to that particular process. Budget systems (and contracting processes) vary as to whether there might be an analysis in the budget dataset down to the contract level or not. Often it might be possible to analyse a budget down to the project level, but not as far as the individual contracting processes or contracts.

Key concepts In OCDS, a contracting process may contain multiple contracts, and multiple payments. Data on contracting processes may relate to a number of different budget and spend related datasets. This diagram captures the different kinds of data that exist when we relate budget, spend and contracting. Sometimes information will be integrated systems: at other times it will be scattered. Although this looks linear, in practice: Budget allocations might be set annually, whilst the contracting process makes a longer-term commitment Spending data and budget execution are updated throughout the lifetime of a contracting process A key question for joining up budget, contracting and spend data is whether there are identifiers (and business processes) that can be used to make a link between systems

Data sources and precendents OCDS Budget Breakdown Extension Having looked at demand, we turned to get a more grounded understanding of existing data supply. We identified six kinds of systems that may hold budget-type information, including budget management systems, aid information management platforms, and payment and spending datasets. We looked at existing work on data standardisation for budgets and spend, noting the conclusions of the OpenBudgets.eu project that there are “a plethora of budget and spending data models which reflect… fine-tuned differences in the legislative design of political entities”. We studied the Fiscal Data Package, which has gone through an evolution to now provide an abstract model for mapping physical budget datasets (i.e. the spreadsheets or tables that ministries may publish) into a common ‘logical model’ annotated with a taxonomy of column types representing fiscal concepts. We’ve also looked at work undertaken in Mexico and Paraguay, and past OCDS discussions on budget and spending data.

Proposed model: design principles (budget data) Only budget allocation and spend relating to specific contracting processes belongs in OCDS E.g. The fact that $5m has been allocated to a specific contracting process to build a school can be provided within an OCDS file. The fact that this comes from a larger $20m Education Ministry budget for school building does not: but should instead be provided in a linked budget dataset. Provide flexibility in budget measures and classifications I.e. OCDS will not define a set of budget classifications or measures, but will allow use of any terms that exist in a countries existing budget and spend systems. This work has led us to a number of design principles and then design decisions. Here I’ll focus very briefly on the principles and decisions related to budget data only. There are some additional elements in the working paper related to spending and project linkages.

Proposed model: design principles (budget data) Defer to the Fiscal Data Package for concept meta-data To avoid ‘bloated’ OCDS data, meta-data about each concept should be captured using an embedded or cross-referenced Fiscal Data Package table specification. Design for tabular data It should be easy to convert an OCDS budget breakdowns into a table, and to gain a reasonable understanding of it without risks of double-counting totals. This work has led us to a number of design principles and then design decisions.

In practice Without cross-referencing the fiscal data package, users can see budget classifications and measure field names and values. Flattened data works as a simple table.

In practice With cross-references to Fiscal Data Package: Field titles can be used; The relationship between fields can be expressed; The fiscal concepts represented by fields can be identified; A link can be made to the physical model of budget data.

In Application Lorena from Mexico will share the functionalities that they are proposing through the linkage of open contracting and open fiscal package data

Implementation Guidance & Support Open Contracting Partnership is working with GIFT to document the approach described in this presentation If you are interested to pilot implementation, please contact us at data@open-contracting.org

Thank you! Lindsey Marchessault Open Contracting Partnership Tim Davies OCDS Helpdesk