Open bookkeeping in the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine
In 2009, Tim Berners-Lee spoke about open data and the future of the Internet in his speech at TED . At 10 minutes, he and the audience chanted “Raw data, now!” (Raw data, now). I recommend everyone who has not done this to watch this performance.
On February 21, 2014, students occupied the building of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine with the requirements of change. Together with political requirements, they put forward the requirements of open bookkeeping. Already on March 24, the new minister signed decree No. 85-a on the daily publication of all accounting entries per day on the ministry’s website. The discovery of the data itself should not have taken time, but it turned out that the MES did not actually have an accounting system, and, for example, the main book was kept on paper.
Data is available today.on the ministry’s website ( UPD: thanks for the new link: sad . The dump can be downloaded from the link ), and under the cat there’s a short instruction on how to process data, a cable for a million hryvnias (about $ 50,000), and why open bookkeeping is not so effective so far.
Postings for every day are in the CSV file, for their analysis the files must be downloaded, linked and converted from Windows 1251:
Now you can search for misuse of funds. I must say right away that the minister, although he agreed to publish the data, but in the end, only the data of the Ministry of Education and Science are available, and this is only 1% of the budget of the ministry.
The document with the identifier 867957e5-d454-11e3-aa1c-00304832dd80 shows that they have in their warehouse a “UTP Category 5e cable” worth more than a million hryvnias:
On September 6, someone received 300 UAH for a business trip, while someone received 14 thousand:
It turns out that the ministry pays the Treasury interest for using a loan, which is about 1.7 million hryvnias for the reporting period:
Open data can be a good tool for public oversight, and it is logical that officials resist. Perhaps the adoption of the law “On the openness of the use of public funds” will change the attitude towards open data in ministries and other state organizations.
On February 21, 2014, students occupied the building of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine with the requirements of change. Together with political requirements, they put forward the requirements of open bookkeeping. Already on March 24, the new minister signed decree No. 85-a on the daily publication of all accounting entries per day on the ministry’s website. The discovery of the data itself should not have taken time, but it turned out that the MES did not actually have an accounting system, and, for example, the main book was kept on paper.
Data is available today.on the ministry’s website ( UPD: thanks for the new link: sad . The dump can be downloaded from the link ), and under the cat there’s a short instruction on how to process data, a cable for a million hryvnias (about $ 50,000), and why open bookkeeping is not so effective so far.
Data retrieval
Postings for every day are in the CSV file, for their analysis the files must be downloaded, linked and converted from Windows 1251:
wget --accept=TXT --recursive --level=1 --no-directories http://www.mon.gov.ua/ua/public_information/vidkr_buch/
rm robots.txt
cat *.TXT > all.txt
enconv -L ukrainian -x UTF-8 all.txt
Now you can search for misuse of funds. I must say right away that the minister, although he agreed to publish the data, but in the end, only the data of the Ministry of Education and Science are available, and this is only 1% of the budget of the ministry.
Cable for a million hryvnia
The document with the identifier 867957e5-d454-11e3-aa1c-00304832dd80 shows that they have in their warehouse a “UTP Category 5e cable” worth more than a million hryvnias:
Travel
On September 6, someone received 300 UAH for a business trip, while someone received 14 thousand:
Treasury Interest
It turns out that the ministry pays the Treasury interest for using a loan, which is about 1.7 million hryvnias for the reporting period:
findings
Open data can be a good tool for public oversight, and it is logical that officials resist. Perhaps the adoption of the law “On the openness of the use of public funds” will change the attitude towards open data in ministries and other state organizations.