Abstract

Changing and transforming technologies

cause major changes in the world we live in.

With the transition to information society,

relations between governments and citizens

are re-formed. Today, digital transformation

causes great changes in institution structures

and brings great opportunities. With digital

transformation, services have been started

to be provided online by governments and BI

technologies have been used extensively for

internal control accounting systems within

management structures. The institutions

through information systems have collected

data sets. As a result of this process, the data

sets are available to everyone without

limitation. The publication of data sets online

and the opening access to all have raised new

opportunities for governments and citizens.

For this reason, Open Data is also important

for the SAIs. In this article, the importance of

open data in terms of the SAIs will be

examined.

Açık Veri (Open Data) Nedir?

What Is Open Data?

Open Data refers to data that everyone can

access, use, and share. Governments,

businesses and individuals make available

online data sets speciﬁc to their functions to

increase social, economic and environmental

beneﬁts. Culture, Science, Finance, Statistics,

environment, public expenditure, etc. topics

can be evaluated within the context of open

data (European Commission, 2012).

The most important feature that should be

present is that there is no limit to the use of

Open Data. Everyone should be able to play a

role in the collection, sharing and use of data,

even if they have commercial purposes.

Although free access to the data is essential,

an access fee can be determined, if it does not

exceed the cost of collection, installation and

management of the related data. In addition,

these data sets should be published in

common used formats that are suitable for

reuse, and machine readable (European

Commission, 2012).

Dr. David Tarrant, from Open Data Institute,

one of the major international organizations,

stated that this data should also be licensed

and validated. Tarrant cited the FAO and the

World Bank as an example (Tarrant, 2017).

Beneﬁts and Risk of Open Data

Open Data has the potential to provide many

beneﬁts to governments, business and civil

society. First, it allows governments to be

more transparent. It also provides evidence

of the use of public resources and the results

of policies implemented by governments. For

example according to David Eaves, open data

allowed citizens in Canada to save the

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Open Data and SAIs

Mahmut GÜLER

Auditor

SAI Turkey

government $3.2bn in fraudulent charitable

donations in 2010 (Eaves, 2010).

O p e n d a t a e n a b l e s n e w b u s i n e s s

o p p o r t u n i t i e s . F o r e x a m p l e , 8 0 0

transportation applications have been made

available in London after the opening of

geographic information systems. In addition,

open data provides a variety of advantages in

t e r m s o f g r o w t h o f e c o n o m i e s ,

transformation of society, environmental

protection, innovation, and enhancing the

quality of academic studies.

Open data brings many new opportunities for

Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable

Development Goal 16 and its sub-goals point

out to develop eﬀective, accountable and

transparent institutions at all levels and

ensure public access to information. In SDG

16, the concepts of accountability and

transparency are important (United Nations,

2015). Therefore, SDG 16 and open data are

connected to each other.

Accountability and transparency help to

understand the requirements of open data

and its expected beneﬁts. The accountability

of an institution means that the institution is

responsible for its actions and decisions.

Transparency is also visible outside the

accountability of institutions. For Open Data,

Accountability is the ability of data sets to

explain the issues they represent and to

include them in their answers. In terms of

open data, transparency means that the data

set can be easily accessed and available

without restrictions. Mayernick, who model

the relationship between these two concepts

with open data, has reached the following

conclusions (Mayernik, 2017):

- There should be no limitation for good data

management

- The concept of transparency clearly refers to

accessibility, but only accessibility is not

suﬃcient

- Understandability of each set of data should

be considering every stage

- In o p e n d a t a , a c c o u n t a b i l i t y a n d

transparency characteristics should always

be achieved together.

Open data can help to better understand the

actions of governments and evaluate their

performance at points that have not been

achieved.

This would result within the framework of

accountability. In addition, increasing

government transparency, public awareness

of government programs and actions help

improve government performance and add

value by increasing participation and

cooperation. It also improves decision-

making processes of governments and

individuals (Ubaldi, 2013).

In addition to the beneﬁts of open data in

terms of transparency and participation, it

also contributes to the coordinated work of

institutions. In spite of the early warnings of

Hurricane Katrina in the United States on

August 29, 2005, one of the most destructive

hurricanes in the history occurred causing

lossess of $125 billion. The Congressional

Bipartisan Select Committee appointed to

investigate the preparation and response to

Katrina was troubled by the lack of

information sharing among federal and state

agencies in the aftermath of the hurricane.

For this reason, people aﬀected by the

disaster were not directed to the right

hospitals and eﬀective rescue operations

could not be carried out in cooperation. As a

result, it was stated by the reviewing

commission that the best struggle against

Katrina is better information. Institutions

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should inform the right people in the right

places and at the right times. At the same

time, coordination between institutions must

be ensured through open data. Thereupon,

President Obama proposed the Open

Government Program to solve the problem

(Peled, 2011).

Besides the beneﬁts of open data, there are

risks. Jan Kucera and Dusan Chlapek (2014)

list these risks as follows:

- Publication of data against the law

- Trade secret protection infringement

- Privacy infringement

- Risk to the security of the infrastructure

- Publication of improper data or

information

- Publication of inaccurate data

- Misinterpretation of the data

- Absence of data consumers

- Subjects less willing to cooperate

- Overlapping of data

- Increased number of requests for data

The expected beneﬁts of open data are

abstract by some researchers and it is

expressed that the results of the targeted

things do not match. Anneke Zuiderwijk and

others (2018) evaluated 168 objective-results

studies on open data. As a result of the

research, open data has been claimed to

beneﬁt from other areas rather than the

targeted areas. For this reason, they stated

that the costs required for open data should

be taken into consideration and beneﬁts

could be obtained in other areas than

targeted.

As we can see, the beneﬁts of open data have

not yet been fully revealed, as there are no

explicit limitations and criteria. In addition,

there are still political, technical, economic

and ﬁnancial, organizational, cultural, legal

challenges awaiting a solution for open data

(Ubaldi, 2013).

Are There Universal Measurement

Criteria for Open Data?

Universal criteria for open data are being

developed by various organizations. These

organizations were established with the

participation of governments and non-

governmental organizations and started

their activities such as, Open Government

Partnership, Open Data Charter, Open Data

Institute, Open Knowledge International,

Open Data Barometer etc. These non-

governmental organizations use some

criteria and are ranking the governments and

publishing annual reports about open data

maturity (The Open Data Barometer, 2018)

(Open Data Charter, 2015) (The Global Open

Data Index, 2017) (Open Knowledge

International, 2019) .

Eight Open Government Data Principles were

deﬁned and put forward for governments'

consideration in December 2007, during an

Open Government Working Group Meeting

held in Sebastopol, which gathered 30 open

government advocates and was organised by

Public.Resource.Org, with sponsorship from

the Sunlight Foundation, Google and Yahoo

(Ubaldi, 2013). These principles include

( S o u c e :

http://resource.org/8_principles.html):

1. Complete: All public data are made

available. Public data are data that is not

subject to valid privacy, security or privilege

limitations.

2. Primary: Data is collected at the source,

with the highest possible level of granularity,

not in aggregate or modiﬁed forms.

3. Timely: Data is made available as quickly as

necessary to preserve the value of the data.

4. Accessible: Data is available to the widest

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range of users for the widest range of

purposes.

5. Machine processable: Data is reasonably

structured to allow automated processing.

6. Non-discriminatory: Data is available to

anyone, with no requirement of registration.

7. Non-proprietary: Data is available in a

format over which no entity has exclusive

control.

8. License-free: Data is not subject to any

regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and

privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Governments have made legal arrangements

for open data and launched programs. The

U.S. national OGD portal was established in

May 2009 for the open data program. A few

months later, a similar portal was established

by the British government. A recently

released Open Data White Paper from the UK

Government. The European Commission has

encouraged open data with the 2003 Public

Sector information directive and the 2011

Ope n Dat a Pa c ka g e. T h e E u rop e an

Commission has issued a Digital Agenda for

Europe and launched its own open data

portal. The Re-use Directive of 2003 is

particularly relevant, as it lays down how

publ i c authorities must m a k e their

documents available for re-use. In 2013, the

Council and the European Parliament

approved a revised Directive that must be

transposed into national law by summer 2015.

Statistics Netherlands (cbs) launched an

open data portal in July 2014 (Ding,

Peristeras, & Hausenblas, 2012) (Yang, Lo, &

Shiang, 2015) (Netherlands Court of Audit,

2015). Many countries have contributed to

the open data movement and as of today, 43

countries have published 1,022,787 data sets

o n 1 9 2 s e p a r a t e t o p i c s

(https://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international

_dataset_catalog_search).

What Is The Relationship Between SAIs and

Open Data?

The SAIs have a very critical role in terms of

open data. SAIs are an example by publishing

online the audit data sets and reporting the

development of open data in institutions. The

Turkish court of accounts also plays a leading

role in the development of open data in

Turkey.

The basic relationship between open data

and audit is established in two ways. First, The

SAIs measure institutions open data

maturity. As an example of this, the

Netherlands Court of accounts has published

three reports for the years 2015-2017. In this

report, the international rankings of the

Netherlands on open data were investigated

and the legal regulations and institutions

were evaluated. In 2012, the Implementing

transparency report was published by the

National Audit Oﬃce (National Audit Oﬃce,

2012).

SAIs make evaluations using online data sets

published by the institutions. Thus, more

eﬀective and eﬃcient use of resources to be

used in audits will be ensured as well as

planning, sampling, Cross-Control, and

determination of audit ﬁndings will be easier.

The Turkish Court of Accounts uses the Open

Data eﬀectively in planning, implementation,

reporting and monitoring of audits.

Furthermore, the Turkish Court of Account

publishes the ﬁnancial audit reports and

shares the detailed data in the annual report

with the public.

The biggest problems with open data are

quality and accuracy. Because, based on this

data, various decisions are taken and

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implemented by governments or individuals.

If there is a poor quality or wrong data, there

is a risky situation (Tarrant, 2017). The SAI

provides assurance by auditing the internal

control and information systems of the

institutions regarding the quality and

accuracy of the data.

Conclusion

The open data subject for countries is part of

the digital transformation. All of the activities

of governments about open data, such as

recording, collecting, processing data,

require advanced information systems. For

this reason, governments must use IT

programs with advanced internal control

mechanisms and identify data sets that will

be qualiﬁed. Once these phases are

completed, however, the open data issue

needs to be discussed.

Open data is a concept that contains many

beneﬁts and risks.

Open data should be determined according to

the political, security, economic and cultural

characteristics of the countries.

As application instances proliferate, some

issues that need to be evaluated will arise. For

this reason, the SAIs have important roles in

the development of open data and in solving

problems.

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Computer Society.Eaves, D. (2010, 4 14). Case Study: How Open data saved Canada $3.2 Billion.

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data: Accountability. Big Data & Society, 1 - 5. doi:10.1177/2053951717718853National Audit

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