Data Quality

IATI differs from other reporting standards and systems, by emphasising the importance of publishing timely data, that is reflective of the swift-changing nature of projects and activities.
With this comes a tension between provision of timely data and quality data, and although IATI stresses provision of timely data that is regularly updated and will change on a regular basis, each organisation that is publishing has taken a different approach to quality assuring their data.

The data published does not need to be audited in the same way as would be done with close of year accounts. However, ultimately, the decision on data quality will be taken by each individual organisation, depending on the internal procedures and processes that data may have to go through before being put in the public domain. It will also depend on whether an organisation approaches IATI as an open data initiative or a process for publishing verified statistics.

For organisations that publish to the CRS, some are seeing the highest level of verification and quality assurance as the data they publish to the CRS, while IATI data is expressly seen as either “preliminary” or “operational”.

There is a section of the implementation schedule that enables publishers to outline the quality assurance processes or any details of their considerations around what they consider to be verified or unverified data, and where their IATI data sits on that scale.