1.8: Obligations
Other Information:
Obligations are the commitments to spend money into which government agencies enter. Things like contracts to buy pens, hiring
of people to write with those pens, and much, much more. USASpending.gov has quickly become the authoritative source for this
information, but it is not the entire view of spending, and the data is "dirty": inconsistent and unreliable. The use of proprietary
DUNS numbers "the Data Universal Numbering System of the firm Dun & Bradstreet" also weakens the availability of obligation
data. There is some good data about obligations, but it is not clean, complete, and well documented. The ideal is to have
one source of obligation data that includes every agency, bureau, program, and project. With a decent amount of data out there,
though, useful for experts, this category gets a B-.
Stakeholder(s):
Indicator(s):
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