OpenAudit is an academe-civil society initiative that transforms the Philippines' extensive collection of Commission on Audit (COA) reports—over 30,000 documents since 1998—into searchable, analyzable evidence for governance research and accountability advocacy. By processing these previously inaccessible audit reports using advanced computational methods, we reveal patterns of fiscal management across all Philippine Local Government Units through normalized disallowance ratios.
This platform calculates disallowance ratios—the percentage of questioned expenditures relative to total operating income—providing citizens, researchers, journalists, and policymakers with a clear, comparable metric for understanding how public funds are managed across LGUs of vastly different sizes and budgets.
Raw disallowance amounts fail to capture the true scale of fiscal irregularities. A ₱10 million disallowance represents vastly different levels of concern for a small municipality versus a highly urbanized city. Our solution normalizes these values to enable meaningful comparisons.
This ratio expresses disallowances as a percentage of an LGU's total operating income, revealing the proportion of public resources subject to audit exceptions.
We combine two authoritative government datasets:
As defined in the SRE reports, Total Current Operating Income represents the sum of all revenues available to an LGU for its operations during a fiscal year. This includes:
This comprehensive income measure provides the most accurate denominator for calculating disallowance ratios, as it represents the full fiscal capacity of each LGU.
For each LGU, we calculate the average operating income across available years (2016-2022) and compare it against total disallowances for the same period. This multi-year approach accounts for annual variations and provides a stable baseline for comparison across LGUs of vastly different sizes and fiscal capacities.
The color gradient from light yellow to dark red immediately reveals which areas have concerning levels of disallowances relative to their fiscal capacity. This visual approach transforms thousands of audit reports into actionable intelligence.
Each category represents a different level of fiscal concern. LGUs with ratios above 2% warrant particular attention, as this suggests systemic issues with financial management or compliance.
Disallowances occur when government expenditures violate laws, rules, or regulations. Patterns of high disallowance ratios often indicate:
OpenAudit democratizes access to public financial data by:
Our comprehensive dataset represents the most complete public accountability platform for the Philippines, covering virtually all LGUs with available audit data. The platform updates as new COA reports are released, ensuring citizens have access to the latest information.
The aggregated data reveals broader patterns that merit investigation:
OpenAudit is built on principles of transparency and reproducibility:
We acknowledge several limitations in the current dataset:
Despite these limitations, the disallowance ratio provides a valuable starting point for understanding fiscal management patterns and identifying areas that warrant closer examination.
OpenAudit builds on a foundation of academic research that recently earned the MIT Open Data Prize in recognition of its contribution to making public sector information usable for research and government accountability. This initiative represents a collaboration between academic institutions and civil society organizations working to strengthen fiscal transparency and accountability in the Philippines.
The Commission on Audit has published over 30,000 annual audit reports since 1998—possibly the longest and most comprehensive series of audit reports in the developing world. Despite their immense value for understanding governance, corruption, and state capacity, these reports have remained largely inaccessible to researchers and citizens due to their unstructured, text-heavy format.
OpenAudit addresses this gap by using advanced natural language processing and computational methods to extract, structure, and aggregate data from these reports. The disallowance ratio metric we present here represents just one dimension of this broader effort to transform audit documents into actionable evidence for improving governance.
While this visualization focuses on disallowance ratios, the broader OpenAudit initiative aims to capture multiple dimensions of fiscal governance, including:
By making this data accessible and analyzable, OpenAudit enables a new generation of research on corruption, accountability, and state capacity, while supporting reformers and advocates in translating this research into actionable initiatives for improving governance.