Hello IATI Technical Team , Bill Anderson
Is there a timescale for the next update of the Coverage statistics?
Additionally, since coverage data was last calculated, and the reference data collected, many more organisations will have published. It seems they get a default score, despite reference data being missing. Is there a plan to extend to all published organisations?
Hi IATI Technical Team - any news on this?
I think coverage data (humanitarian spend for 2016 & 2017) is proposed to be collected for the Grand Bargain - it would be useful to know how this relates.
Bill Anderson is this spam?
With the <total-expenditure> element now in place in the organisation standard we need (as planned) to establish a self-reporting mechanism to:
This is in our job queue but we don’t currently have an ETA. Will keep you posted.
Using open data publish with the IATI standard sounds like a good step
For total-expenditure there seem to be 45 publishers currently using that
It would be useful to understand the scope that the current data enables. Of the 45, only a few publish this element multiple times, for example
I’m sure someone like Andy Lulham or Mark Brough could take a look…
stevieflow:
For total-expenditure there seem to be 45 publishers currently using that
IATI Technical Team , the link from this Dashboard total-expenditure element to the Standard page (presumably describing the element) returns a 404 error.
Thanks Michelle Levesque
I agree that the subset of total expenditure is what the GB dashboard uses. But - I would suggest that this has noting to do with IATI!
Of course, the GB dashboard uses IATI data and much of the methodology deployed in the IATI dashboard. However, I think it important to establish this is a independent operation.
I would be concerned that we start to enter into discussion around changes to the IATI standard (adding of total-humanitarian-spend, for example) to accommodate such use cases.
I appreciate that that doesn’t sound very helpful
(I think the GB team at DI have asked for the humanitarian spend figures from GB signatories directly --> Wendy Rogers )
bill_anderson:
This is in our job queue but we don’t currently have an ETA. Will keep you posted.
Bill Anderson do you know when we would know more about this?
Bill Anderson any updates on this? The number of publishers without (2014) coverage reference data now far exceeds those with. The knock on is that the coverage-adjusted score is calculated with the arbitrary 20% for many many publishers. This just looks strange, particularly to those new to IATI.
bill_anderson:
- Agree on a mechanism to check the accuracy of the reported data.
I suppose the detail around this bit is also important, since it seems the methodological complexity has been shifted to here.
petyakangalova:
I believe the ‘verification’ part will be something you will be doing for the Aid Transparency Index.
I suspect the “verification” part may also become relevant for the IATI Coverage methodology, as part of the intention to:
bill_anderson:
- Agree on a mechanism to check the accuracy of the reported data.
In fact, I suspect much of the complexity of the new coverage methodology has been shifted into this bullet point.
Coverage came up at MA so having a way to measure it correctly and more timely is needed. If I’m understanding this correctly the use of the “total expenditure” element in the organizational file is what is proposed. I’d like to point out that for the GB dashboard that will only work if there is a breakdown of the total expenditure by humanitarian and non-humanitarian categories is possible. It would be misleading to measure humanitarian coverage for the GB dashboard against total expenditure for any organization whose total expenditure is a combination of humanitarian, development and other/administrative activity.
Thanks Michelle Levesque
I agree that the subset of total expenditure is what the GB dashboard uses. But - I would suggest that this has noting to do with IATI!
Of course, the GB dashboard uses IATI data and much of the methodology deployed in the IATI dashboard. However, I think it important to establish this is a independent operation.
I would be concerned that we start to enter into discussion around changes to the IATI standard (adding of total-humanitarian-spend, for example) to accommodate such use cases.
I appreciate that that doesn’t sound very helpful
(I think the GB team at DI have asked for the humanitarian spend figures from GB signatories directly --> Wendy Rogers )
bill_anderson:
This is in our job queue but we don’t currently have an ETA. Will keep you posted.
Bill Anderson do you know when we would know more about this?
Steven Flower
I agree with your point about not trying to satisfy GB use case particularly as even the basic IATI dashboard hasn’t addressed coverage in a couple of years and cracking that nut is important. I would still point out that “total expenditure”, if not well defined or understood, could still be very misleading as a denominator in the coverage calculation. Total expenditure for an organization often includes expenditures never intended to be part of IATI publishing (administrative, normative) so without clarity or sub-elements, attributes (I don’t know the correct way to slice that) it may still lead to misleading results.
And just and FYI: the GB dashboard has not yet captured coverage at all. I have no idea if/when this will be addressed in the narrow context of the GB but we all score zero so it is a level playing field for the moment.
Thanks Michelle Levesque
The IATI documentation states:
The recommendation is that, where and when possible, the organisation’s total annual planned budget for each of the next three years is reported.
It’ll be interesting to see if there are any ranges around this definition, as you (rightly) anticipate. Once we’ve got some data in place, it could then be time to review.
A (hopefully interesting!) added bonus with the organisation standard, is that there is the ability to include a/multiple “line item” within any of the financial elements, including total-expenditure (known as expense-line). This might be what you’re thinking about / looking for, in terms of answering the question “what part of the total expenditure was on humanitarian?”…?
I can see that 15 publishers currently use expense-line in total-expenditure, so it’d be interesting if someone (or something) were to analyse this …
IOM is one of those 15 publishers. We do include line-item info all of which ties to our audited financials. Our data doesn’t reference or even isolate humanitarian from development but it is something we could do if/when coverage statistics want to pull from the org file.
The IATI technical team did a manual collection of reference spend for 2014 and 2015 from all IATI publishers two years ago. The process involved emailing publishers, collecting data manually and storing in a public Google sheet. This is not a sustainable method for collecting coverage data and the IATI tech team has not done reference spend collection for any new IATI publishers over the past two years. This means that the coverage data and then coverage-adjusted scores on the Summary Statistics are not up to date for all IATI publishers.
As a result, the current plan is to remove the coverage and coverage-adjusted columns from the Summary Statistics page on the Dashboard, keeping the coverage page only for reference, until the process for collecting reference spend is automated and up to date. In the meantime, we strongly encourage that all IATI publishers include in their organisation file total-expenditure.
Thanks for the comments and ideas Michelle Levesque
We will be emailing all IATI publishers next week to inform them about the planned changes of removing coverage-adjusted score and would strongly encouraged all to use total-expenditure in their organisation file.
On including total-expenditure in the summary statistics methodology, we don’t have an ETA yet for when that will be incorporated in the publisher statistics, but would keep in mind the idea about highlighting publishers that have already included total-expenditure in their file.
Thanks Petya Kangalova
Have publishers been emailed?
I assume that the methodology to use the total-expenditure would run (at least) a year “behind”. For example:
Because - it seems unrealistic for publishers to have their total-expenditure published (and all their activity data, on the 1st January each year. For many, getting this data together might take a few months. Therefore, it would seem the IATI dashboard methodology would need to accommodate this, in line with regular financial process & timescales.
Great to see this move forward, nevertheless. Thanks.
How about putting a statistic about which publisher includes total expenditure in the org file on the statistics page? It would highlight whose coverage could theoretically could be calculated (as imperfect as it may be) and may provide an incentive for others to include that data in their org files so we get closer to actually having an automated way of calculating coverage. Assuming people still agree that coverage is important.
(At least some) publishers have been emailed, yes.
The core message is as follows:
"In the future we plan to compare the value of the element published in your organisation file with the calculated total spend (expenditure + disbursements) for a given year published in your activity files.
To prepare for this please ensure you are publishing an organisation file which contains the element for at least all years that you have been publishing to IATI."
I’m not sure I understand this last part: “for at least all the years that you have been publishing to IATI”. This seems like a fairly tall order, and not necessarily a very useful one for publishers who have (very partial) data going back over many years.
I assume coverage will be assessed for recent years (probably a year behind, as suggested by Steven). Could the Tech Team confirm what is the proposed approach?
Perhaps another mini-conversation at TAG?
Yes, the TAG would be a good opportunity to make sure we all understand what is being proposed.
However, it would be great if the IATI Technical Team could share more details ahead of time so we can prepare.
Going over the thread again, I’m not sure we fully answered some queries.
Could the IATI Technical Team provide clarifications on the questions above - in particular regarding the period for which coverage would be calculated ie 1) what time lag (2 years, as suggested by Steven) and 2) how far back in time.
thanks
Hi Yohanna.
Thanks for the follow-up and apologies for the delay in getting back to you. Following the tech audit last August, there was no immediate action to work on the IATI dashboard and we have not looked into a new methodology for the coverage assessment.
This is currently on hold so I cannot confirm what period the coverage assessment would cover. The recommendation for the Dashboard was to revisit re-building the Dashboard as we have updated the community in our last blog: https://iatistandard.org/en/news/iati-technical-team-our-detailed-quarterly-update/
In the meantime, I would still encourage using total-expenditure in the organisation file .
Hi IATI Technical Team:
Following up on this I wanted to let you know that we have been looking into this issue at Publish What You Fund.
We looked at the total-expenditure field of the 45 publishers assessed in the 2018 Aid Transparency Index and compared these with the total of expenditures and disbursements for that year. This is what we found:
In order for this proposed methodology to work we would need to encourage publishers to consistently add their data to the total-expenditure field and to have some form of verification, in order to address point 2. Linking to an annual report or official figure elsewhere is one suggestion of how this could be done.
Hi Alex. Many thanks for providing this useful analysis from the work you have done.
In order for this proposed methodology to work we would need to encourage publishers to consistently add their data to the total-expenditure field and to have some form of verification, in order to address point 2.
Yes, I agree that we need to encourage more organisation to be using the total-expenditure field. I believe the ‘verification’ part will be something you will be doing for the Aid Transparency Index. One way will be to see if organisations have added a relevant document-link in their organisation file.
petyakangalova:
I believe the ‘verification’ part will be something you will be doing for the Aid Transparency Index.
I suspect the “verification” part may also become relevant for the IATI Coverage methodology, as part of the intention to:
bill_anderson:
- Agree on a mechanism to check the accuracy of the reported data.
In fact, I suspect much of the complexity of the new coverage methodology has been shifted into this bullet point.
Hi Petya - thanks for getting back to me.
petyakangalova:
Yes, I agree that we need to encourage more organisation to be using the total-expenditure field. I believe the ‘verification’ part will be something you will be doing for the Aid Transparency Index. One way will be to see if organisations have added a relevant document-link in their organisation file.
To avoid confusion I suggest we focus the discussion in this thread on IATI’s coverage statistics rather than on the Aid Transparency Index. My suggestion is that the total-expenditure element should have some form of verification to address my point 2:
alexjtilley:
The figure used is often just the sum of disbursements + expenditure recorded in a publisher’s IATI activities, so does not help to provide a comparison with which to measure coverage.
One way of doing this would be to require a published document such as an annual report, audited accounts or other public statement which corroborates the figure entered in the total-expenditure field. I’m not sure whether this could/should be done using the existing document-link in the org file, by adding a new code to the document-link codelist or as an additional subelement in the total-expenditure element.
It would be good to hear views from those more involved in the technical detail of the standard as to whether this is a workable proposal and what may be the best way to implement it.
alexjtilley:
One way of doing this would be to require a published document such as an annual report, audited accounts or other public statement which corroborates the figure entered in the total-expenditure field. I’m not sure whether this could/should be done using the existing document-link in the org file, by adding a new code to the document-link codelist or as an additional subelement in the total-expenditure element.
Thanks Alex Tilley
We know that the B codes in the DocumentCategory codelist are to be used for organisation level documents. Of these, B01 - Annual Report seems the most likely (in fact, the only?) existing category for budgetary/spent information ?
I’d be very wary of mandating a document-link of a certain type, as that would a) be in place for everybody (and for some publishers there may be good reason not to include it, and b) as it involves a codelist value it would have to be implemented by a new ruleset
The document-link block being added within the total-expenditure element is interesting - in the same way a document-link could be relevant to a specific transaction or location (for example). I think that possibility takes us into a new area of discussion - around the future flexibility of the standard - so maybe not on the table for addressing this more immediate need.
Alex Tilley thank you for following up. As Steven Flower has summarized, currently there is the option to add a document-link at organisation level, specify the type and link to relevant document, such as Annual reports. However, this is not a mandatory field in IATI.
One way of doing this would be to require a published document such as an annual report, audited accounts or other public statement which corroborates the figure entered in the total-expenditure field.
I would agree that the above would be quite a strong requirement. Advising organisations and recommending that they add/ refer to a relevant document is beneficial for users of the data, can be one way forward.
alexjtilley:
The figure used is often just the sum of disbursements + expenditure recorded in a publisher’s IATI activities, so does not help to provide a comparison with which to measure coverage.
One way of doing this would be to require a published document such as an annual report, audited accounts or other public statement which corroborates the figure entered in the total-expenditure field. I’m not sure whether this could/should be done using the existing document-link in the org file, by adding a new code to the document-link codelist or as an additional subelement in the total-expenditure element.
One potential issue is where an organisation has a mix of activities (hence expenditure) and some of these are not relevant to IATI. The figure in the total-expenditure element may be the result of calculations that will not necessarily appear in a clear way in the annual report. For instance, total-expenditure for IATI may be “pillar 1C + all of pillar 2 + pillar 3A”. Not insurmontable, but we’d need to think of ways (and provide guidance on how) to communicate what total-expenditure represents if it’s less than 100% of an organization’s budget.
stevieflow:
We know that the B codes in the DocumentCategory codelist are to be used for organisation level documents. Of these, B01 - Annual Report seems the most likely (in fact, the only ?) existing category for budgetary/spent information ?
Thanks Steven - just wondering how easy/feasible/helpful it would be to add an extra B code for “total-expenditure” in the general document link codelist?
The idea would be that publishers could use this new code to tag a document that corroborates the total-expenditure field amount. This could then be used as an extra tag for a document such as an Annual Report if it contains the figure, or for a new document that shows total annual spend, such as an official expenditure statement.
Hi Alex Tilley
just wondering how easy
The DocumentCategory codelist is flagged as a Core codelist:
Core Codelists contain conforming values for a particular decimal Version of the IATI Standard, the contents of which are managed by the IATI Technical Team. Core Codelists contain codes that involve functional logic that impacts the way in which the Standard is interpreted and processed.
So, I think the answer is: not that easily. Or: not as easily as a Non Core codelist change.
feasible
Whilst we have a process to do this, I think it’s fair to flag there’s no advertised schedule for an “upgrade” to the standard. So, whilst a proposal could be made for editing this Core codelist, there’s no actual mechanism in place to do so, right now
We should also consider that a change to the standard will take some months to fully implement, and then publishers will need to update their systems to use any new possibilities
Sorry - that doesn’t sound like an encouraging answer - but hopefully helpful!
helpful
I’d encourage anyone with a proposal to change/add/modify the standard to gather user stories and a wide range of support. I’d also be ready for discussion and debate on any proposal - as we all have to consider the impacts on existing and future users. A kind of stress testing, maybe.
alexjtilley:
The idea would be that publishers could use this new code to tag a document that corroborates the total-expenditure field amount.
As mentioned earlier in this thread, it is possible that no document will clearly corroborate the total-expenditure amount.
Rather than discussing changes to the standard to enable this option, perhaps we should discuss whether it is so important to corroborate the amount declared? Could we not assume organisations act in good faith when declaring their total expenditures? With of course the possibility that a stakeholder could challenge the amount declared, in which case the organisation could be asked to explain and corroborate its declaration (and correct it if needed).
All organisations have to adhere to financial mangement standards; deliberate misreporting is a serious matters, so I simply cannot imagine it happening on a large scale. Is it really worth designing a verification method beyond the publication of the annual report?
Hi Petya - thanks for getting back to me.
petyakangalova:
Yes, I agree that we need to encourage more organisation to be using the total-expenditure field. I believe the ‘verification’ part will be something you will be doing for the Aid Transparency Index. One way will be to see if organisations have added a relevant document-link in their organisation file.
To avoid confusion I suggest we focus the discussion in this thread on IATI’s coverage statistics rather than on the Aid Transparency Index. My suggestion is that the total-expenditure element should have some form of verification to address my point 2:
alexjtilley:
The figure used is often just the sum of disbursements + expenditure recorded in a publisher’s IATI activities, so does not help to provide a comparison with which to measure coverage.
One way of doing this would be to require a published document such as an annual report, audited accounts or other public statement which corroborates the figure entered in the total-expenditure field. I’m not sure whether this could/should be done using the existing document-link in the org file, by adding a new code to the document-link codelist or as an additional subelement in the total-expenditure element.
It would be good to hear views from those more involved in the technical detail of the standard as to whether this is a workable proposal and what may be the best way to implement it.
There has been a lot of good discussion about this topic on this post so I thought it might also be useful to share how we are currently planning to assess coverage for Grand Bargain signatories (as part of the the Grand Bargain Transparency workstream).
As Michelle Levesque has mentioned earlier we (those working on the Grand Bargain) are only interested in the total operational spend for humanitarian activities. Therefore our proposal is to use the expenses-line element of total-expenditure with a predefined @ref of ‘HUMTOT’ so that we can identify the expenses line that contains the humanitarian only total value.
total-expenditure
period-start iso-date=“2018-04-06”
period-end iso-date=“2019-04-05”
value value-date=“2019-04-05”>10000000/value
expense-line ref=“HUMTOT”
value value-date=“2019-04-05”>5000000/value
narrative
Total operational spend for humanitarian activities. Figure can be validated by reference to page 32 of the 2018-2019 annual report at www.myorganisation.org/annual-report-2019
/narrative
/expense-line
/total-expenditure
This is not of course a perfect solution as we will have to rely on publishers providing specific attribute content. However it does potentially meet our purposes for now. The publisher could also choose to include a link to a document which provides verification of any figures provided via the field (although again not a perfect solution!). However, the new approach of using does have some advantages:
As ever any thoughts about this approach are very welcome?
ping IATI Technical Team Bill Anderson
Any news on this IATI Technical Team ?