Last Friday I participated in a study day of the Dutch and Belgian audit authorities (the Algemene Rekenkamer and the Rekenhof). Topic of discussion was how open data can play a role in audit work.

Noël van Herreweghe, the open data program manager of the Flemish government, first sketched the situation of open data in Flanders. Afterwards I talked about the current status of open data in the Netherlands, and the lessons learned about doing open data well from the past years. (see my slides embedded below)

A few elements that I think are relevant in the context of the work of audit authorities are:

  • current open data is mostly about what government knows, not about what government does. The latter is what matters to auditors however. More transactional data is needed, maybe from the back-end of e-government services.
  • open data can be a pre-hypothesis tool, showing patterns that generate questions or give direction to/ help focus audits on areas where it matters most.
  • open data can be used to assess impact of policies, also/specifically/even when the data is not directly describing a certain policy area, but serves as a proxy from further down the chain of causality.
  • And then there is the many-eyes aspect of open data of course: if there is a ‘scandal’ hiding in the data, it may be found more easily through increased eyeballs (although there might be more false positives/noise as well).

    We split up in groups and rotated through three short workshops exploring these notions. One session where specific audit questions were connected (or attempted) to open data sources which could contain pointers, and stakeholders involved. One session showing how free open source online tools can help clean up and explore data and show first patterns. One session with a quick routine to brainstorm indicators that can be proxies for a certain question. In this case we looked at proxy indicators for the quality of school buildings. The Dutch court of audit is currently doing a pilot involving the collection of opinions as well as pictures as part of an audit, concerning the quality of school buildings.