Case Study: Making government financial reports "machine readable"

This post was written by Marc Joffe, Senior Policy Analyst, Reason Foundation and Chair of the XBRL US Standard Government Reporting Working Group

**The problem: **

In the United States, about 30,000 local governments produce audited financial statements. But the data from these statements cannot be readily aggregated or compared because they are in PDF format.

**Who worked on it: **

Progress has been made by non-profit organisations including the Data Coalition and XBRL US, who can put together working groups of tool vendors, academics, think-tank researchers and government officials.

**What did they do? **

Our first success involved the passage of a law in Florida that set a timeline for adopting an open, machine readable format, XBRL, for local government financial reporting. Measures were subsequently proposed in California and Illinois, but did not pass. Our outreach is now primarily directed to the federal government, which receives about half of the financial statements produced by local governments each year.

**What did they learn? **

The domain has a lot of inertia and there are vested interests opposed to greater transparency. Public sector leaders must be educated so that they realise that making this technological improvement does not necessarily require great cost and inconvenience.

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)