Last week, three agencies proposed an amendment that would have a transformative effect on the way the government tracks its grants and contracts spending.
Continue readingRecovery.gov dumps DUNS, highlighting need for open entity IDs
A trove of data will soon disappear from Recovery.gov. It's a relatively minor blow for transparency in the end, but highlights a problem with how the US government tracks the entities it does business with.
Continue readingUser interface pro tips with Senator McCaskill
Yesterday morning the Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight held a hearing on contractor performance information and its ease of use for oversight purposes.
Continue readingNew Rule Takes On Pay-to-Play in Muni Bonds
Sunlight has long been an advocate for not only improved transparency of government institutions but also for thoughtful transparency measures that have open data standards in mind. Today we submitted a letter to the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) supporting a proposed rule change that would give voters more information about who is trying to influence bond ballot issues. The Board is working toward improved disclosure of ballot campaign contributions by those with certain connections to municipal bonds. We applaud this step toward greater transparency on an issue that deeply impacts local governments and their constituents. Voters have a clear interest in understanding the context of the bonds approved for their communities. Investigative journalists have already used these kinds of disclosures to write stories like this one from Voice of San Diego, which exposed the trend of those who contributed to school bond campaigns receiving the contracts they spent money influencing. The improved disclosures MSRB is mandating will be available through the Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) system, which is the free public platform for searching municipal bond information maintained by MSRB. Our comments also suggest the Board consider two more steps it could take toward 21st century disclosure.
Continue readingNew Hope for Legal Entity Identifiers (AKA Corporate Identifiers)
We’ve written about unique corporate identifiers on this blog with relative frequency over the past year. We even built a... View Article
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