The federal DATA Act could increase internal management efficiency and transparency by creating an open data set for all federal spending. A Deloitte survey examines how to navigate the cultural and technological hurdles for successful implementation.
With data an often-underutilized asset in the public sector, enhancing availability and transparency can make a big difference in enabling agencies to use data analytics to their advantage—and the public’s. Thoughtful use of data-driven insights can help agencies monitor performance, evaluate results, and make evidence-based decisions. Having access to key facts can drive impressive improvements: When the United States Postal Service compiled and standardized a number of its data sets, the office of the USPS Inspector General’s data-modeling team was able to use them to identify about $100 million in savings opportunities, as well as recover more than $20 million in funds lost to possible fraud.
For government chief data officers (CDOs), one of the key drivers for data transparency is the federal government’s effort to implement wide-scale data interoperability through the Data Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act), which seeks to create an open data set for all federal spending. If successful, the DATA Act could dramatically increase internal efficiency and external transparency. However, our interviews with more than 20 DATA Act stakeholders revealed some potential challenges to its implementation that could be important to address.
Before addressing these implementation challenges, it may help to know how the DATA Act sets out to make information on federal expenditures more easily accessible and transparent.
Implementation of the DATA Act is still in its early stages; the first open-spending data set went live in May 2017. If the act is successfully implemented, by 2022, spending data will flow automatically from agency originators to interested government officials and private citizens through publicly available websites. This could save time and increase efficiency across the federal government in several ways, possibly including the following:
Spending reports would populate automatically. Agency leaders wouldn’t need to request distinct spending reports from different units of their agencies—the information would compile automatically. For example, a user could see the Department of Homeland Security’s spending at a summary level or review spending at the component level.
Congress could make appropriations more transparent. When crafting legislation, Congress could evaluate the impact of spending bills with greater ease. Shifting a few sliders on a dashboard could show the impact of proposed changes to each agency’s budget. Negotiations could be conducted using easy-to-digest pie charts reflecting each proposal’s impact.
Auditors would need to do less detective work. Auditors would have direct access to data describing spending at a granular level. Rather than often digging through disparate records and unconnected systems, auditors could see an integrated money flow. Using data analytics, auditors could gauge the cost-effectiveness of spending decisions or compare similar endeavors in different agencies or regions. These efforts could help root out fraud.
Citizens could see where the money goes. With greater spending transparency, citizens could have real-time clarity into how government decisions might influence local grant recipients, nonprofits, and infrastructure. It could be as easy for a citizen to see the path of every penny as it would for an agency head.
The DATA Act has the potential to transform various federal management practices. While much work remains to be done, the technology to support the DATA Act has already been developed, giving the act a strong foundation.
The DATA Act mandates that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) maintain a unified data format, or “schema,” to organize all federal spending reports.
