At the portal Open Spending Albania on the section Money and Power (One Stop Integrated Data Source) publishes data about the assets, incomes, and expenditures declared by high level officials in politics and judiciary. Such data were either declared in a certain year or before the public official took office. In any case, the respective documents contain the date in which it was submitted to the High Inspectorate of Declaration of Assets in Albania (HIDAA). Such declarations are made not only by the public officials themselves, but also by their family members, who are subject to declaration in accordance with the national legislation. Annual declarations contain information about the incomes of the respective year, properties gained during the declaring year, and expenditures, which according to the law, should be declared. The high public officials subject to such declaration include: the President of the Republic, Members of the Council of Ministers, and Mayors of main Municipalities, Members of Parliament, high-level Judges, Chief Prosecutor, and directors of independent institutions. The information they declare is published and made transparent in order to inform the public about the economic interests and assets of the high public official, who represent and govern the country. The data published under Money & Power are interlinked with those published under the Open Corporates Albania on business companies declared by individuals. The data for each individual includes the index number of the reference document submitted to the High Inspectorate for the Declaration of Assets in Albania (HIDAAA).

In order to increase transparency over the Government data, AIS, the implementer of Open Data Albania Project, has enabled the Albanian public, journalists, scientific researchers, businessmen, and Government’s opponents and opposition, to get informed in real time about every expenditure made by the State Treasury both in the form of transactions and payments.

Such monitoring is done through the Spending Data Albania portal under the Treasury Transactions section. This system, which is open to the public, includes data from the state treasury for 1400 state-budget institutions like ministries, Government agencies, independent institutions, municipalities and communes, and central and regional directorates.

Every such transaction is now online for all those who wish to know how and how much is spent. The application contains data from January 2012 up to date.

People may search the data using the available filters for the following categories:

• State-budget Institutions that make payments;
• payment Beneficiaries or Clients;
• the date on which a payment was ordered or executed;
• the value of a transaction.

Data can also be searched through the Expenditure Category. Every transaction contains a description of the order or contracts that enables a payment. Payments made for public works awarded through a tender procedure are also part of the system.

The system also contains a special section on Monitoring Ministries only, as part of the Government Cabinet.

This space for transparency enables the public to lean about expenditures on public interest, cases of abuse and excessive expenditures for specific categories, and cases of nepotism and conflict of interest involving certain clients or beneficiaries.

We would like to thank NED and OSF for financially supporting the work for enabling the online Monitoring of the Treasury Transactions. We would also like to thank the Albanian Government, which since January 2012, in the context of its commitment for Partnership for an Open Government, enables access to payments made by the state institutions through the state treasury. Thus, our country, Albania, becomes part of the countries, where the public has access to the State Treasury Transactions.

We invite the public to widely use these data; the taxpayers may get information about how their money is spent; the media may report on cases of abuse and conflict of interest; and watchdog organizations may use the Treasury Transactions data to promote accountability and exercise public pressure for good governance.

In honor of International Anti – Corruption Day, our organization AIS is happy to announce new tools and more released data for more transparency not only about public expenditures. Those data and tools are part of our new project Money, Government and Politics.

This project and its activities intend to address issues of abuse, corruption, and conflict of interest in the context of governance and politics in Albania. The program aims at opening data about the wealth of high state officials; expenditures of state institutions; electoral spending and expenditures of the concessionary companies. Comparison and analysis of such data increases transparency and public pressure in cases of favors in funds or public assets.

The objective of the Money; Government and Politics Project is to expand the Open Data Albania and Spending Data Albania platform by introducing new data that will empower the Albanian public with information and better decision-making skills.

Project time frame: November 2014 – 30 December 2014. Donor: National Endowment for Democracy, and other potential funds to be raised.