Financial Transparency System FTS EU DATATHON 2017 EUdatathon

Financial Transparency System (FTS) EU DATATHON 2017 #EUdatathon – 11 November 2017 Concrete example of open data initiative DG Budget, unit C 6 Financial reporting and strategy Olivier Juvyns

What is the Financial Transparency System (FTS) • Online database, available on Europa, providing information on recipients of EU funds implemented directly by the Commission between 2007 and 2016 • http: //ec. europa. eu/budget/fts • Specifies the names and locations of the thousands of recipients which were allocated a total of more than EUR 195 billion during this period. • Recipient: any natural or legal person that signs a grant agreement, a procurement contract, …

Why is the FTS important • Part of the European Transparency Initiative (ETI) launched in 2005. The Commission committed itself as follows: • "For centrally managed expenditure … (to) focus on improving and harmonising the presentation of the data on beneficiaries, currently presented in very different formats across DGs“ • Legal requirement, publication by June N+1 • Article 35 of the financial regulation applicable to the general budget of the Union http: //eur-lex. europa. eu/legalcontent/EN/TXT/HTML/? uri=CELEX: 32012 R 0966&from=EN • It is one of the European Commission's most important tools to increase EU funding transparency.

Why is the FTS interesting • FTS is a centralised database • containing 380. 000 commitment positions, • for a total of more than EUR 195 billion, • from its inception in 2007 until now (2016). • FTS is a popular tool • 400 queries per day • Reused by the general public, researchers, journalists, MEPs (Members of the European Parliament), colleagues • FTS produces open data • FTS search engine, full dataset downloadable • Also published on the Open Data portal https: //data. europa. eu/euodp/en/dataset/FTS

How do we produce the data • FTS uses data from the Commission's financial and accounting application "ABAC" • ABAC (Accrual Based Accounting System) is the financial and accounting application set up by the Commission, to monitor the execution of its budget and to prepare its accounts.

What are the limitations of the FTS • Exhaustivity • Contains information only on recipients of EU funds directly managed by the Commission, around 20% of EU Budget In practice, around 80% of the EU budget is managed by national or regional governments (under the so-called 'shared management' mode). EU Member States are thus responsible for publishing data on the beneficiaries of the funds they administer. These data are not published on the FTS but on national websites. • Difficult to categorise spending • such as consultancy and until recently NGOs Since 2016 NGO search is available, based on self-declarations by entities

What are the limitations of the FTS Difficult to compare with other sources • We publish legal obligations signed in the selected financial year • commitment appropriations which are legal pledges to provide finance, provided that certain conditions are fulfilled. The subsequent payments (not published on the FTS), can therefore be spread over more than one year and the total amount paid out may be smaller. • Repartition for each recipient is not always known • the estimated amount for matching beneficiaries represents the sum of the indicative share for each beneficiary when this information is available depending on the type of agreement and in accordance with the Financial Regulation. As the actual share may evolve over the lifespan of a project the amounts published are indicative.

What's next • Specification of the EU Spending Vocabulary • the availability of information in a machine-readable format as well as a thin layer of commonly agreed metadata could facilitate data cross-referencing and interoperability. Therefore, the value for reuse of the data would be considerably enhanced. • The goal is to publish the data that is currently available on the FTS as Linked Open Data on the EU Open Data. Portal, so that it can be enriched with data from other data sets. As a first step, the data will be linked to the EU Budget.

EU DATATHON 2017 • "Reusing European Union open data for jobs and growth" • What could the dataset reveal? • Could it be better presented, in a more interactive way? • Mobile app potential improvements? • Important to keep in mind • Integrity of the data is essential Data integrity is the maintenance of, and the assurance of the accuracy and consistency of, data over its entire life-cycle, and is a critical aspect to the design, implementation and usage of any system which stores, processes, or retrieves data. (Wikipedia) • Context information should always be provided What is included, what is excluded In order to prevent comparability issues (only 20% of EU expenditure)

Comparability issues: should we keep track of and monitor data being reused?

Thanks for your attention! Any question: BUDG-FTS@ec. europa. eu http: //ec. europa. eu/budget/index_en. cfm Facebook: https: //www. facebook. com/EUBudget Twitter: https: //twitter. com/EU_Budget Google+: http: //goo. gl/w. XZrq