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The E-Data Portal Offers New Opportunities for Control over Public Finance
01 April 2016
The E-Data Portal Offers New Opportunities for Control over Public Finance
   A round table Citizen Control over Budget Funds: Unique Features Offered by E-Data Portal organized by the IBSER, which is implementing the Municipal Finance Strengthening Initiative (MFSI-II) Roll-out Project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with support of the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance was held at the Ukrinform News Agency on March 30.
   The round table was attended by about 35 representatives of NGOs and media organizations.
   According to Oleksandr Shchelokov, the E-Data project director, this official portal of the public finance of Ukraine is currently the country's largest database of movements of funds, which already contains 17 mln transactions and about 3.3 mln reports, agreements, and acts made by spending units at various levels. “Today, the E-Data portal is an unprecedentedly open system. No country in Europe discloses all its expenses on a daily basis”, – says Oleksandr Shchelokov. The portal has abo
ut 35,000 visitors daily.
   A presentation of Ukraine's second ever open API also took place at the round table. The API provides a revolutionary opportunity to work with information about public funds. “Realization of an API interface (application or applied programming) at the E-Data portal gives its users a unique opportunity of automated systemic control over public spending”, – says Project's IT Architect Yuriy Filatov. He underlines, the use of API is one of the two legal ways of accessing the portal database. The second one involves search by transaction and manual downloading of returned results.
   The hands-on experience of using the E-Data portal to search for information about public funds and for control over their use was shared by NGO and civil society representatives. According to the public activists, today, the information on E-Data is a significant step in combating corruption at the so-called “ground level”.
    Reference: E-Data is an official government information portal on the Internet, which is used to publish the information on use of public funds. The project goal is to create an open resource, which will ensure absolute transparency of public finance and satisfy the right of the public to obtain information about the use of budget funds.