HELP ME GET THIS IMPORTANT GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT BACK UP AND RUNNING
About Us
Back in 2007 while reading a
Maclean's magazine article about the
Canadian federal travel and hospitality budget, I was struck by how
complex and time-consuming it was to actually glean any discernable
facts or figures from the published information.
The original intention of the proactive disclosure requirement
was to make transparent the formerly hidden expense claims of
members of parliament.
As the article states:
"Parliament's idea of 'disclosure' is to post a mélange of unrelated,
unaudited and in some cases incomplete figures that offer neither
context nor comfort. No grand totals -- not by individual, not by
department and certainly not government-wide. A citizen curious to
know how much senior Immigration officials spend on travel and
hospitality will need a few spare hours and a calculator."
It occurred to me
that I could probably write a computer program to simplify this
process and publish more concrete facts and figures on a website
for the general public.
I felt this was an important component of an open and transparent
democracy and to prevent abuse of the expense system. I was
dismayed that the information was right there but nearly impossible
to actually sift through without spending days with a calculator,
meticulously clicking through thousands of pages and adding everything
up manually.
It occurred to me
that I could probably write a computer program to simplify this
process and publish more concrete facts and figures on a website
for the general public. So that is exactly what I have done.
No longer does it require hours and hours of manually adding
up thousands of individual expense numbers to find out these
astonishing grand totals and other expense figures.
It is all available right here, for the public, in an easy
to understand format, just how the public wants it, to satisfy
their curiosity, and be able to keep an eye on this enormous
government spending.
In 2009 I presented this idea to an old
high-school friend who was very enthusiastic about the project,
so we set to work on planning out exactly how we were going to do
this. In early 2010 after months of hard work and perseverence
we have released the initial version of this site with the first
few departments that we have accumulated, with more coming through
every week.
Based upon the numbers that are appearing so far, it turns out
that this budget overall is huge. Some individuals
spend hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of expenses
on themselves alone. By opening the eyes of the
public and raising awareness, perhaps it will be possible to
curb over-spending in this billion dollar budget and reduce
impact to the taxpayer, thereby helping to lift the economy
out of its current recession.
It is certainly possible to reduce excess spending by
some simple changes such as flying coach instead of
first-class, doing teleconferencing and webconferencing
when possible instead of travelling overseas on a monthly
basis, and then of course doing simple audits to ensure
that each and every expense claim is for a legitimate
purpose.
By reducing government waste and redistributing tax monies to
more appropriate and universally beneficial areas such as
health care, information infrastructures, and other public
services it is my hope that this contribution will improve
quality of life for everyone and reduce the impact of
overconsumption.
Disclaimer
Please note: All data presented on this site is simply a reproduction
of actual expense claims that have been published under the proactive disclosure
requirement for Canadian federal travel and hospitality expenses.
In some cases, there may be a typo in a date or other data field
as entered by the member claiming
the expense.
We present the data in a completely unaltered format, exactly
as originally published on the official Canadian government website.
This can be verified by clicking through to the source URL. In cases where
the data appears to be entered incorrectly at the source, we flag it,
but make no attempts to alter or fix it in any way. This may result
in some of our reports displaying what appears to be incorrect information.
In these cases, it reflects upon the inaccuracy of the data either entered
by the original claimant or as published by the Canadian government website.
We do a thorough QA verification to ensure that we are reporting precisely
the data as officially published. Errors, omissions, typos or other
inaccuracies of the source data fields are the responsibility
of either the original claimant or
of the Canadian government website publisher.
If anyone from the
Canadian government wishes to work with us in order to locate and
rectify any of these errors, please
contact us and we would be happy to
help you find these inaccuracies in the source data.
Name Mappings
When published, the expense claim entries display the name of the person
who is claiming the expense. Sometimes the individual enters their
name as "John Smith", sometimes as "John W. Smith" and sometimes they have
additional titles like "Dr. John W. Smith" or "The Honourable John Smith".
As you can imagine, this presents a problem in determining exactly who
is whom in order to aggregate the data entered. As such, we publish
the list of
name mappings which we
have used to correlate identical individuals.
Copyright © 2009
Bine Consulting Corp.
Generated on 2019-11-01 4:05:00 PM