Assessing open government budgetary data in Brazil

Abstract

Budget transparency is an instrumental factor for better understanding the concept of budget within a democratic context. International codes for best governance practices in public management have appointed the internet as a communication media with the potential to provide this information in a timely and transparent manner to the several players in the society, and open government data has added important elements to this scenario. Currently, there is no structured framework to evaluate the quality of the budgetary information disclosed on the web. This paper takes this into consideration when proposing an assessment framework and analyzing data collected from two samples: one composed by 54 budgetary websites from different Brazilian executive power levels (national, state and municipal), complemented with another sample of 34 Brazilian audit court websites.