New Initiative: Open Data for Tax Justice #OD4TJ
Jonathan Gray - March 2, 2016 in Campaigning, Featured, OD4TJ, Open Data, Open Government Data, Open Knowledge, Our Work, Public Money


Jonathan Gray - March 2, 2016 in Campaigning, Featured, OD4TJ, Open Data, Open Government Data, Open Knowledge, Our Work, Public Money
Jonathan Gray - September 2, 2015 in digital methods, Featured, financial transparency, issue mapping, open budget data, Open Data, Open Government Data, Policy, Public Money, Releases, research
CSOs, IGOs, multilaterals and governments should undertake further work to identify, engage with and map the interests of a broader range of civil society actors whose work might benefit from open fiscal data, in order to inform data release priorities and data standards work. Stronger feedback loops should be established between the contexts of data production and its various contexts of usage in civil society – particularly in journalism and in advocacy.
Governments, IGOs and funders should support pilot projects undertaken by CSOs and/or media organisations in order to further explore the role of data in the democratisation of fiscal policy – especially in relation to areas which appear to have been comparatively under-explored in this field, such as tax distribution and tax base erosion, or tracking money through from revenues to results.
Governments should work to make data “citizen readable” as well as “machine readable”, and should take steps to ensure that information about flows of public money and the institutional processes around them are accessible to non-specialist audiences – including through documentation, media, events and guidance materials. This is a critical step towards the greater democratisation and accountability of fiscal policy.
Further research should be undertaken to explore the potential implications and impacts of opening up information about public finance which is currently not routinely disclosed, such as more detailed data about tax revenues – as well as measures needed to protect the personal privacy of individuals.
CSOs, IGOs, multilaterals and governments should work together to promote and adopt consistent definitions of open budget data, open spending data and open fiscal data in order to establish the legal and technical openness of public information about public money as a global norm in financial transparency.
Theodora Middleton - March 24, 2014 in Campaigning, Featured, Open Government Data, Public Money, Stop Secret Contracts
Jonathan Gray - November 22, 2013 in Campaigning, Featured, Open Data, Open Government Data, Public Money, Transparency
Participants at “Follow the Money” session at the Open Government Partnership Summit 2013 in London.
Jonathan Gray - October 30, 2013 in Campaigning, Featured, Open Data, Open Government Data, Public Money
Detail from FollowTheMoney.net
Jonathan Gray - October 16, 2013 in Policy, Public Money
If Alliance Boots had not deducted its finance costs, the Treasury would be richer by an estimated £1.12 billion to £1.28 billion. Even taking the lower end of that range, those tax payments could have funded more than two and a half years of total prescription fees for all of England. It is also equivalent to the starting salary of more than 78,000 NHS nurses for a year – roughly 120 additional nurses per parliamentary constituency, and more than the total number of nurses estimated to be cut from the NHS between 2010 and 2015 [...]In their concluding recommendations, the report’s authors highlight the importance of greater transparency around company ownership and public contracting, which could both help to discourage the kind of aggressive tax avoidance practised by Alliance Boots. They write:
The Government should introduce a rigorous public system of documentation and disclosure of beneficial ownership in the UK and require regulatory reform of the Overseas Territories – such as Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands. [...] Ensuring that a rigorous public register is introduced is vital in order to be able to assess the true beneficiaries of the kinds of related party financial transactions used by Alliance Boots.We heartily concur with this conclusion. As we’ve said before, we think that registries of who really owns companies around the world should be published as open data. The UK government has a major opportunity to take leadership in this area by making its own registry of beneficial ownership publicly available, and by encouraging other countries to do the same through various international fora, such as the G8, the G20, the OECD and the Open Government Partnership. We’ll be covering developments in this area (or absence thereof!) at the Open Government Partnership Summit in London in a couple of weeks, so watch this space.
Detail from the “Alliance Boots and the Tax Gap” report released yesterday.
Jonathan Gray - October 4, 2013 in OKCon, Open Data, Open Government Data, Public Money
Participants at “Follow the Money” session at OKCon 2013 in Geneva.
Jonathan Gray - September 12, 2013 in Featured, OKCon, Open Data, Public Money
Guest - September 10, 2013 in OKCon, Public Money
Jonathan Gray - August 21, 2013 in Campaigning, Featured, Open Data, Open Government Data, Policy, Public Money
A visualisation of legal entities that are part of the same corporate grouping from OpenCorporates