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Indicator: 1
Measurements in/of 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.
| Type |
Actual |
Target |
| StartDate |
|
2011-12-14 |
| EndDate |
2011-12-14 |
|
| Machine-Readable Format |
C+ |
|
| Description |
There are several different data sources that reveal obligations: FAADS/FAADS+ and CFDA, for example. But their numbers don't
match up, and - unless you're going to have each agency uniformly publish its own data - obligations shouldn't be published
in different places. It's hard to consider either one authoritative (even if the law says they both are). FAADS+/FPDS (via
USASpending.gov), CFDA, and FPDS (the Federal Procurement Data System) are
online and stable, but they are potentially incomplete because not all agencies may report to them. The use of proprietary
DUNS numbers also weakens them in terms of availability. Just sorting through all the acronyms can get you down. Ask data
experts to get into the quality of each data source, and you'll be boggled by the questions regarding which agencies' obligations
are reported at which source, whether given sources dumb down the data by excluding small dollar
amounts or by aggregating data about smaller agencies. Some sources are more timely than others. Etc. etc. etc. All
these issues frustrate transparency. Data about obligations is not clean, complete and well documented. With a decent amount
of data out there, though, useful for experts, this category gets a C+.
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The ideal is to have one source of obligation data that combines the strengths of all the existing sources and that includes
every agency, bureau, program, and project.
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