Governance
Digital Accountability and Transparency Act: DATA
- 10 Jul 2020
- 2 min read
Why in News
Recently, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has suggested three-phase transition to mandatory digital payments, accounting, and transactions for the Central government under a proposed project and law called Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA).
Key Points
- The suggestions recognise the need of digital public utilities. It not only includes e-services but makes all government revenue and expenditure data electronic, machine-readable, purpose linked, non-repudiable, reliable, accessible and searchable.
- Requirement for Digitisation, i.e. 100 % end-to-end electronic data capture. This includes all receipts and expenditure transactions including demands, assessment, and invoices should be received, processed, and paid electronically.
- Data governance for standards across all government entities. Data standards are rules for describing and recording data elements with precise meanings and semantics that enable integration, sharing, and interoperability.
- Technology architecture: Under this all IT government systems should conform to a prescribed open architecture framework while ensuring robust security and maintaining privacy.
- Benefits of Digitisation:
- It has many advantages, it recognises off-budget transactions, business continuity (e.g. electronic records cannot be lost or misplaced like files or paper records), and an incontrovertible audit trail.
- It will also enable Parliament and legislatures to draw assurance that each rupee due to the government has been collected, and each rupee has been spent for the purpose it was allocated.
- Prescribing data elements for all transactions will ensure standardisation, clarify ambiguity, minimise redundant data, and create protocols for integration across different databases.
- It will enable the use of cognitive intelligence tools like analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, which in turn will support the establishment of budget baselines, detecting anomalies, data-driven project costing, performance comparisons across departments and agencies, and benchmarking.
