2.9: Parties
Other Information:
When the government spends taxpayer dollars, to what parties is it sending the money? Right now, reporting on parties is dominated
by the DUNS number. It provides a unique identifier for each business entity and was developed by Dun & Bradstreet in the
1960s. It's very nice to have a distinct identifier for every entity doing business with the government, but it is not very
nice to have the numbering system be a proprietary one. "Parties" would grade well in terms of machine-readability, which
is one of the most important measures of transparency, but because it scores so low on availability, its machine-readability
is kind of moot. Until the government moves to an open identifier system for recipients of funds, it will get weak grades
on publication of this essential data.
Stakeholder(s):
Indicator(s):
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