Madrid has announced plans to create a giant central database in which every single grant and subsidy underwritten by public funds will be published.
From townhall to national government, public body to state owned company, if they’re offering citizens a chance to grab some taxpayers cash, it’ll go online in this database.
Assuming they actually go ahead with this, and it works, it will be a useful step forwards.
The stated idea is to allow citizens easy access to all public grants, and help fight corruption by allowing anyone interested to see exactly what’s going on.
The thing is, the State already collects this information, but it’s not for public access. So the idea is simply to build a public frontend to the database, which already exists, and let citizen journalists try to find the crooked ones.