Bringing NGOs Accountability
The Slovak tax code allows citizens and corporations to assign 2% of their income tax worth (€ 50 million) to Slovak-based non-profit organizations every year. At the same time, the public knows little about how the money is actually spent. Citizen donors receive virtually no feedback on their contributions, and NGOs see 2% as ‘free money’ that requires only formal, inconsequential reporting.
There is incidental evidence confirming problems ranging from lack of good governance to outright abuse. For example, we have found out that an NGO, Esperanza, received more than € 200.000 in 2010 and does not even have a webpage. We also found that the Penta Foundation spent more than € 270.000 in 2008 buying equipment for its own profit making medical clinic ProCare (http://bit.ly/mMGlni). The lack of transparent reporting and accountability from NGOs toward donors is becoming a problem with only a third of the population participating in the scheme, this creates a mistrust towards non-profits.
We propose a new project that would 1) collect and parse PDF data in a publicly accessible 2% database; 2) create a ranking of the top 100 recipients of taxpayers’ money based on their transparency and accountability to the public 3) based on the data analysis, suggest policy measures increasing transparency and accountability in non-profits. The Hackathon could contribute to number one of this project.
Additional information:
Data required is hosted by the Ministry of Justice in pdf files (e.g. http://bit.ly/mMGlni) and structured forms (e.g. http://bit.ly/TnFrgj). Should data be obtained in other way than scraping and parsing, the project could create a platform for data browsing and analysis
