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Databases

BDAP

Intro

Within the general context of the State Accounting reform and harmonization of the accounting principles used by the various Bodies, Article 13 of Act no 196 of 2009 has provided for the creation of a Public Administration Data Base (BDAP) at the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, designed to be an instrument that facilitates the analysis, control and monitoring of public accounts, through structured data promptly collected and centralized in a single data base managed by the General Accounting Office of the State, capable of redistributing to all institutional players certified information enriched as a result of integration with all the other data residing on the Business Intelligence system of the various departments.

The inclusion of the BDAP in the context of the State Accounting reform, in pursuance of the combined provisions with Act 42/2009, emphasizes the supporting role it has in the governance of public finance and in the collection and management of relevant information; the nature of the mandate received from the legislator appears clearly in the preparatory phase of Act 196/2009:  “[…] the public administrations shall endow themselves with a data base […]  thanks to which they can share the data accessible to all public administrations and which may become a widely used transparent tool for the disclosure of public finance data and enable comparisons between administrations and bodies of the same nature.” Senate Act 1937/2009.

In the light of the mentioned provisions, the main aims and functions that the BDAP supports are:

  • Analysis and Assessment of the expenditure of the Central Administrations of the State;
  • Control, Monitoring and Consolidation of Public Accounts;
  • Implementation and Stability of Fiscal Federalism.

The data to be entered into the data base mentioned in Article 13 are the budget data, subsequent variations, the final end-of-year accounts and the data on management operations besides all the information required for the implementation of Act 196/2009.

The OpenBDAP Project is part of a broader initiative of the General Accounting Office of the State aimed at developing and updating, around its IT systems, an ecosystem of means for the fruition of information where access, presentation and processing methods are well structured and harmonized, and where the various groups of users can find the instruments that are best suited to meeting their information needs.

This new openness towards information about public finance data being increasingly widespread and available has led to the choice of allowing access to the home page of the site of the BDAP directly from the OpenBDAP platform, while accredited institutional users can enter into the BDAP through the “Reserved Access” window.

The OpenBDAP makes available to a highly variegated range of users some 1000 datasets which are constantly being expanded. The organization of the functions and services is designed in such a way as to guide the user through many access paths, into deeper and deeper levels, starting from the Macro-areas down to the records of the Thematic Areas, where the user will find one or several Fact Sheets. The freely accessible information is completed by text documents and files in a format that allows processing, and open data to which access is easy.

From this viewpoint, the set of laws known as “Freedom of Information Act” (FOIA) identifies the OpenBADP Portal as an instrument available to the various Bodies for publishing their data in view of administrative transparency .