The government spends 570 thousand euros for the "Open Data Government" portal, but the data is missing

2022-08-29 09:07:13Politikë SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

The government spends 570 thousand euros for the "Open Data

The Albanian government has built a portal for data transparency under the project: "Construction of the portal for open government, opendata.gov.al", for which it has spent 62 million lek (about 570) thousand euros, according to data from the treasury of the Ministry of Finance, but the data on the portal is missing.

The portal, which is already in operation, does not have information for most categories, while there is only some information that belongs to the year 2019, such as imports of beer, cigarettes and fuel given that these are published in real time by the Ministry of Finance and the General Directorate of Customs and accessible to all.

The creation of the portal from the taxes of Albanian citizens is a project carried out by the National Agency for Information Society (AKSHI). Official sources from ANA affirmed that the portal is already in full operation, but the data population is the duty of the institutions that produce this data.

The portal is designed to publish data on the main categories of public services, which include all sectors such as education, health, infrastructure, culture. But in the meantime, many categories are empty and incomplete with data even though the portal has been operating for more than a year.

Thousands of euros for the portal are nothing more than the collection of data that the Ministries already publish, in a single portal. But OpenData, even though it was created to facilitate transparency, is not fulfilling this function.

In general, the government has taken steps backwards with the transparency of important government data.

The quarterly budget monitoring reports of the institutions that provided fresh data on the progress of the use of the state budget are now published more late and some of the important institutions have given up their publication.

Also, the Ministry of Finance is not publishing some important documents for the administration of public finances. The Concession Monitoring Report, a document that the Ministry of Finance is obliged to publish at least once a year and submit to the Assembly, was not published this year.

The Institute of Statistics has taken steps behind as well. Data Base with household expenses for 2020 has not been published yet, unlike in previous years. While some data on the labor market have been reduced, while the calendar for many other routine public/ MONITOR is not respected


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