How to Check Integrity of Fiscal Data

Comprehensive fiscal reporting in line with international standards such as the IMF Fiscal Transparency Code and Government Finance Statistics Manual provides reasonable assurance about a government’s fiscal position and its integrity. However, before fiscal reports are issued, checks should be made to ensure that the data are reliable, consistent, accurate, and complete. The accuracy and reliability of government accounts and fiscal data is an issue in a number of countries, with significant and persistent discrepancies that can indicate underlying weaknesses in the country’s public financial management system, as well as problems with the integrity of financial data and processes. This note provides guidance on how to detect issues with data quality, perform integrity checks, and reconcile fiscal data from various sources. It discusses the importance of reconciliation to provide reasonable assurance on the quality and reliability of government fiscal data, explores the main reasons for which discrepancies may arise, describes how to assess the quality of fiscal data, and explains how to conduct quality checks. The note concludes with recommendations for country teams of concrete steps to ensure data quality. Annexes cover procedures to perform bank reconciliations, discuss how to identify common sources of the main-line items of a fiscal table, and present two country examples.