Transparency in Asset Declarations

Analysing MPs' assets

We would like to create an application that will help to analyse assets and income declarations (IAD) published by Russian officials under the anti-corruption law. There is already declarator.org, a data base, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in this area. It can be helpful to create parsing codes for some common declaration formats.

Russian anti-corruption law obliges a large number of public officials to publish their declarations on-line, but it does not provide a standard form of publishing, so those IAD are published in different formats and hidden on official websites. TI-Russia, along  with some volunteer programmers, had developed the declarator.org data base, where data is collected. There is a need to develop some codes to parse this data - at least to be able to get all the names out of files.

As of now, TI-Russia is analyzing income and assets declarations of public officials since 2010 and will continue those operations. In the mean time public attention to this topic is increasing and the State Duma will adopt a law that will launch a special checking procedure if assets acquired by officials are higher then his/her income. If public officials will not be able to provide explanation of his/her enrichment – it will be confiscated. This law will give more ground for analysis of those declarations.