One obvious challenge of the twenty-first century is the lack of adequate budget transparency (real-time accuracy) to support the achievement of good governance and a strong need to ensure efficiency and transparency in the use of available resources. As mentioned in EU policy papers, budget transparency brings many benefits for citizens and for society. Openness, trust and public accountability are among these benefits. Increasingly, fostering budget transparency is also seen as vital to promoting integrity in public governance and strengthening the anti-corruption policies. However, putting budget transparency into practice can sometimes appear as a daunting task: where should a country/city/municipality begin in implementing a reform agenda? Where should citizens and civil society organisations focus their efforts, to make a meaningful impact in realising these potential benefits?
The Eurobarometer Research on Corruption (Special Eurobarometer 470) showed that corruption at local level or the regional level of authority is believed by 90% of citizens, which is the most in the EU after Greece with 91%. Likewise, according to the perception of the corruption index, which was measured by Transparency International, Croatia has been positioned for a several years between Saudi Arabia and Cuba, two intrinsically undemocratic and non-transparent systems. Such a situation represents a major problem for municipal and city authorities who want to work transparently and openly, because without public trust it is impossible have constructive cooperation within the local community to deal with overgrown social and economic problems.
This is why our project ‘Budget at glance’ goes for true, complete transparency of work by local authorities so that citizens have insight into each individual, local budget transaction. This means public access to data on to whom, when, how much and why a certain amount was paid, whether or not it is about legal or natural persons (including employees in local government). While in developed democracies such transparency is considered a standard (e.g. every single transaction in the US federal budget of $1.5 trillion is available to the public through the online search engine), in Croatia this has never existed. ‘Budget at a glance’ is an online platform optimised for mobile devices that is accessed through a web browser, and consists of three main parts:
- budget data of the local self-government unit: a base of background data that users access or through a web search engine, or through an API interface using a GET method (including real-time data);
- the analytical part: visualisation and analysis of available budget data, including the implementation of interesting quality solutions proposed by citizens;
- the communication part: reporting possible suspects in corruption and archiving official responses, where the role of mediators is taken over by civil society organisations capable of understanding local authority budget functioning.
The town of Bjelovar was the first to open its budget in Croatia to this level of transparency, and is the leader of this initiative. However, the platform is available to all municipalities and cities to use so their budgets can represent the public on this transparent way.