Ministry of Finance of Ukraine issued the following announcement on Sept. 17.

September 17 during a press conference on the occasion of the third anniversary of the launch of the E-Data portal Minister of Finance of Ukraine Oksana Markarova presented the second module of the portal - an open "Budget for Citizens" (openbudget.gov.ua). The project aims to show all stages of the budget process from beginning to end - planning, implementation and analysis.

"Today, the module allows you to see the main indicators of the implementation of the budget for 2018: the structure of incomes and expenditures, as well as the level of budget execution. All information is in the format of open data and updated on a monthly basis, "said Oksana Markarova.

Now on the portal you can trace how much money went to education, defense, medicine, national functions for seven months of 2018, information for August will be September 25. Developers point out that this is just the beginning of big plans.

"The full implementation of the project will take about two years. Our goal is to open as much data as possible in an understandable way, since it is not about abstract budgets, but about who and at what expense the funds of Ukrainian citizens ", - said Alexander Komareus, head of the public sector" Public Public Finances ".

The project manager, E-Data Alexander Shchelokov reminded that e-data.gov.ua today is the largest open source data portal in Ukraine in the public finance sector. No less important is that interest in the portal has increased significantly compared with last year.

As of September 1, 2018, the portal already contains 2 million reports, 10 million contracts, 95, 5 million budget transactions (payments), 44 thousand state organizations registered on the portal and began to report on used funds. In addition, 23 million acts have already been entered into the portal and all this information is open access.

"The volumes of information for monitoring power, business development and analytics are more than adequate. But the term "open data" means only that access to them is free, and the information itself is provided in machine readable format. Information can be useful, vital, driving force when it will be used by mass media, journalists-investigators, detectives, security specialists, citizens, businesses at least daily, "he concluded.

The head of the Eidos Center Victor Taran noted the policy of the Ministry of Finance in implementing the law of Ukraine "On the openness of the use of public funds": "However, there are examples where local and state enterprises are sabotaging the implementation of the law on the ground," he said, "that is why our team registered a bill, which increases the responsibility for non-fulfillment of the basic requirements of openness and transparency. We hope that it will be adopted in the parliament in the near future ".

In the plans of the Citizen Budget Project there is an item on the opening of local budgets. Nadia Babinskaya, an expert on open data, emphasized that the important innovation introduced by the portal is the openness of information about budget formation from the request to execution. "For citizens, there is valuable information about their daily lives: when they repair the entrance or when they change windows in the school. Who decides to buy tables and to whom. Open Budget should answer the simple questions of people ", - concluded Nadezhda.

The event was held with the support of the project "Effective Public Finance Management" implemented by the federal company Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, on behalf of the Governments of Germany and the United Kingdom.

Original source can be found here.