Public Finance Data

By the end of 2021, the French Court Auditors had published 204 datasets on the data.gouv.fr platform. The number of publications was very high in the 2016-2018 period because the court published datasets from before 2014. After 2018, the variation corresponds with the published work of the court (there is no fixed number of studies or audits per year). [4]

a)             Organising open events.

The court organised open events to improve citizens’ access to public information and data. It ran two hackathons in June 2018[5] and January 2020, providing an opportunity for data specialists, developers, researchers, journalists and even curious citizens to take up challenges based on the financial data of local authorities – including the execution of local authority budgets, the impact of public policies on local finances, and financial relations between the state and local authorities.[6] The Cour des Comptes also co-organised a hackathon with the Ministry of Finance on local public finances in December 2021,[7] and ran an online public consultation in 2022, to fix its topics of control for the upcoming year.[8]

All datasets published by the court are available at data.gouv.fr with a built-in app.[9] Different tools have been published to facilitate the reuse of data. In 2018, the Cour des Comptes published on GitHub the source code of its financial analysis software OpenAnafi,[10] which automatically uses local authority accounting data to produce financial analysis grids.[11] This source code was crucial for civil society to understand how the financial analysis of the court was carried out.

In December 2021, the court published a dashboard of the state public finances.[12] According to official statistics on data.gouv.fr, most open datasets have never been reused.[13] However, it is difficult to assess reuse, because the platform only concerns re-usage which users post on the platform or studies published on it, which is unlikely to cover most cases.[14]

The court’s priority has been to increase communication on its outputs and activities. As a result, it has taken the following actions:

–   The court advertises all its reports in the media, issuing a press release after each publication. The financial jurisdictions received more than 27,000 items of print, audio-visual and online press coverage in 2020. Although this is 30 per cent less than in 2019, it is almost as much as the number of publications.[15]

–   The court has become active on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter.[16] It posts about the activities of the court’s first president and other court events. The social media accounts also inform users about new reports or other publications.

–   In April 2019, the court organised a one-day workshop on building a visualisation platform for online contributions by citizens to the Grand National Debate. Some 130 people gathered to design a platform to analyse and visualise the 14,000 online contributions mentioning France’s financial jurisdictions.[17]

Interaction with civil society: Public policy evaluations incur substantial cost, which prevents the court from launching more than two per year under its current budget.[21]

“Open-washing”: Despite attractive visuals, datasets are often limited “where the final beneficiaries are aggregated at too large a territorial scale and where the amounts allocated are not always specified”. Greater precision is necessary to move beyond a public communication tool to real proactive data transparency.[22]

• Improve the use of datasets: The court is working on developing data visualisation platforms to increase the reuse of its data by journalists, academics and civil society.
• Develop new publication formats and shorter, more engaging content, to increase the visibility of the court’s activities and its role in the public debate.
• Publish all the reports: To date, only a third of reports have been published. This is partly due to secrecy around defence audits of military organisations, but also to the lack of an open-data culture within the administration.
• Develop public policy evaluations that include a citizen panel: There has been an average of around two evaluations per year in the last 4-5 years.

Recommendations

• Improve the quality of the datasets to foster their use by citizens: The court should keep in mind that datasets need to provide high-quality, structured and well-documented data if citizens are to use them. It should further ensure data is presented in a disaggregated form, to avoid “open-washing”.
• Exhaustive publication of data and reports: This is already in the court’s 2025 action plan, and is crucial to achieving transparency.
• Greater public policy evaluation involving citizens: The state should dedicate more resources to evaluation and citizen panels.
• Increase cooperation with civil society: Involve more CSOs advocating for open data, such as Ouvre-Boîte and La Quadrature du Net, and take their recommendations into account when designing and implementing strategies, action plans and commitments.