COINS data

The UK Government's HM Treasury use a budgeting system called COINS. Available from 2010-06-4 at http://data.gov.uk/dataset/coins

The Data COINS stores

The COINS database contains the main high level reports on public spending, including:

• Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis
• Country Regional Analysis
• The Budget
• The Supplementary Budget Information
• The Supply Estimates
• Some of the Office of National Statistics Blue Book
• Some of the Office of National Statistics Pink Book
• The Whole of Government Accounts

For an overview see this blog post by Lisa Evans.

Public Access and Data requests

The COINS database is currently publicly available but before this was the case, several people made Freedom of Information requests to obtain it.

For example, BBC journalist Martin Rosenbaum made a Freedom of Information Request for the data in September 2009.

His request was rejected. In his BBC article, he links to the appeal rejection letter(PDF) from HM Treasury.

Another request for the COINS data was made by the software engineer Julian Todd.

The details we, the Open Knowledge Foundation, obtained about the COINS database are:

• The COINS data fields
• The COINS training materials
• The contract for COINS including the intellectual property rights

Some more details about COINS:

• All accounts on COINS receive a PESA Transfer tag, which indicates the broad economic category of the spending if it leaves the public sector. (point 1 of http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/cra_guidance_annexc.pdf)