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All U.S. foreign assistance transparency work is driven and informed by the primary objective to make aid more effective for
development. Increased transparency accomplishes this objective by assisting recipient governments in better managing their
aid flows and by empowering citizens to hold governments accountable for how assistance is used. U.S. foreign assistance is
more effective and accountable when it is more transparent, and so the United States pledged to release and implement reporting
requirements for foreign aid in the Plan. The Administration made significant progress toward this commitment by issuing robust,
government-wide reporting guidance; dedicating a full-time team to work on implementation; immediately engaging the seven
agencies with the largest foreign assistance portfolios; and laying the foundation to achieve 100-percent coverage by the
end of 2015. The Federal Government achieved the first half of its commitment by issuing government-wide guidance on reporting
requirements for all Federal agencies that administer foreign assistance. In September 2012, OMB released Bulletin 12-01,
which directs U.S. agencies to collect foreign assistance data and outlines all required data fields needed to satisfy multiple
reporting requirements. The Bulletin underscores the U.S. commitment to make foreign assistance information more transparent,
accessible, and compatible with international standards, and lays out the policy objectives that the U.S. Government seeks
to achieve. The Bulletin also outlines the guiding principles for reporting foreign assistance data - including a presumption
in favor of openness and an emphasis on more detailed, timely, and quality data - and establishes "principled exceptions"
to provide agencies with sufficient flexibility to protect sensitive information from disclosure on a case-by-case basis.
Finally, the Bulletin includes a prioritized order for agency implementation, based on the relative size of that agency's
foreign assistance portfolio. The Bulletin institutionalizes foreign assistance reporting by directing agencies to publish
their data to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard ("Dashboard"). The Dashboard makes U.S. foreign assistance data available to
the public in open, machine-readable formats and visualizes those data enabling various stakeholders to track U.S. foreign
assistance investments, including civil society organizations, Congress, government agencies, other donors, and partner country
governments. The Dashboard currently contains the most recent foreign assistance budgets, obligation, and disbursement data
for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), as well as the
budget planning data for the Department of State. Consistent with the OMB Bulletin, the Dashboard will expand over time to
include more detailed financial and program data from USAID, MCC, and Department of State, and will eventually include data
from all U.S. Government agencies engaged in foreign assistance. Achieving that goal requires a significant effort - led by
the Dashboard team - to map agency-specific program management systems to the Dashboard's sector framework, identify foreign
assistance activities for non-aid agencies, scrub for double counting of foreign assistance funds transferred from one agency
to another, and create automatic data feeds to facilitate quarterly reporting. While complete reporting from all relevant
agencies will take additional time, reporting is underway and focuses on displaying data from the agencies with the largest
portion of U.S. foreign assistance. This work by the Dashboard implementation team is fundamental to ensuring the sustainability
of U.S. foreign assistance transparency efforts. Further, the Administration has exceeded the letter of its Plan commitment
by signing the United States onto the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) in November 2011. In December 2012,
the Administration published the schedule under which it will release data in IATI format. Already, the United States has
posted initial foreign assistance data in IATI's internationally-comparable data standard on the Dashboard in XML format.
This effort is emblematic of the U.S. commitment to transparency. As additional agencies add new data to the Dashboard, IATI
data files will be updated and activity-level reporting will become more robust. The Dashboard serves as the mechanism to
deliver a unified U.S. report that meets the IATI standard.
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Agencies will be responsible for providing a set of common data fields that are internationally comparable. The information
collected through the above initiative will be released in an open format and made available on a central portal - the Foreign
Assistance Dashboard (ForeignAssistance.gov) - that will be updated quarterly.
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