Availability: Asset declarations

To what extent is interest and asset declaration information available as open data?

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

Disclosure datasets should provide a comprehensive overview of the financial state of all relevant public officials, clearly identifying their income, assets, and liabilities, including in-kind and non-financial interests. In addition to regular updates, such data should include information on any significant changes in an official's assets and liabilities—for example, it should be responsive to changes in employment. Disclosure datasets should also use unique identifiers to clearly identify not only the public official but also any partners, family members, or other intimates that the country requires to disclose interests and assets as well.

Among other functions, it should be possible to use disclosure datasets to verify that relevant public officials do not have interests that trigger conflict between their public responsibilities and private identity. Datasets may include information about interests that have been divested or placed in a blind trust or other mechanism designated by the country.

Research Guidance

Starting points

• Sources:
  • Transparency International's Integrity Watch includes political integrity information for ten countries: Chile as well as nine in Europe (France, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Slovenia, Span, United Kingdom); depending on the country, this may include political finance data, interest and asset information, and lobbying data; from the main site, select "National versions" to see specifics for each country. Datasets are available here.
• Search:
  • The site of the country's relevant oversight agency or agencies; these may include, for example, an office of governmental ethics, public integrity agency, etc.
• Consult:
  • Investigative journalists who report on conflicts of interest, public officials' assets, or money in politics more broadly, particularly any who appear to be using aggregate interest and asset data.
  • Officials of civil society organizations that advocate for transparency and accountability regarding money in politics.

What to look for?

To complete the assessment for this question you will need to access and explore the available data. This may involve running queries on datasets to check the variety of fields included.

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

• What financial and non-financial information does the data include? For example, does it include information about income, assets and liabilities, and in kind or non-financial interests?
• Does the data include information about significant changes in assets? For example, in response to a change in employment or substantial change in investments?
• Whose interests and assets are disclosed? Does the data only include information about some public officials or all public officials? Does it include information about the interests and assets of an official's family or other intimates?
• Is there evidence of missing data, assessed first against the related governance framework, if that exists, or in the context of the datasets in front of you?
• Is there evidence that the availability of this data was affected by COVID-19?

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries, asset declarations may be generated and published at the sub-national level, carried out by individual states, regions, or cities.

Focus on national government first, and then assess whether:

• National datasets also include data from sub-national or local government units;
• Equivalent data exists for a selection of sub-national or local government units, but is not nationally aggregated;

To assess countries where asset declarations are organized sub-nationally, researchers should select the strongest example of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether this is an outlier or an example of widespread practice.

Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online.

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

• Data fields and quality:

• The data contains unique identifiers for each public official and any family members or intimates for whom disclosure is required. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If asset declaration data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where public official identifiers are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains information on income, assets, and liabilities. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If asset declaration data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where income, assets, and liabilities details are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains information on in-kind and non-financial interests. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If asset declaration data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where in kind and non-financial details are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains information on significant changes in assets and liabilities. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If asset declaration data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where details about changes in assets and liabilities are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data contains details of the assets and liabilities held by each family member for whom disclosure is required. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If asset declaration data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where details about family assets and liabilities are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data openness, timing, and structure:

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

  If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

• Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: When was the most recent update to this dataset?

• Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Negative scoring:

• This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where the indicator itself identifies a dataset(s) to assess against or a separate governance indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such identified dataset(s) or related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information (e.g., are some fields entirely empty when they shouldn't be?), your local knowledge (e.g., if the data is supposed to include information for all public officials, does the number of total entries look right?), and any broader research you may have done for this theme (e.g., have media articles decried the incompleteness of the data?).

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

• The availability of this data has been affected by government response to COVID-19. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe how COVID-19 affected the availability of this data.

Extent

• How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?
  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.

    Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for most but not all localities.

    Supporting questions: Which localities does this data cover?

  • The data assessed provides national coverage.

Indicator Justification

Interest and asset declarations, sometimes referred to as wealth declarations or financial disclosures, have been used since at least 1960, when the Philippines passed its Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act requiring public officials to declare under oath their assets and liabilities at the beginning and end of their terms in office (Apostol n.d.). In 2003, the adoption of the UN Convention Against Corruption, which includes strong declaration practices, sparked a renewed focus on the declaration as an accountability mechanism. A World Bank study published in 2016 found that 161 of 176 countries had some form of interest and asset declaration, though these showed significant variation (Rossi, Pop, and Berger 2016).

To support government transparency and accountability efforts, this indicator investigates the data that countries make available regarding the interests and assets of public officials. This indicator pairs with a related governance indicator to compare frameworks and actual practice.