How can active advertising obligations be effectively guaranteed on transparency portals?

The Transparency Laws (Law 19/2013 and Catalan Law 19/2014) establish the need for Public Administrations (AAPP) to create their transparency portals as a tool to make available to citizens the active advertising data they foresee. These data, in accordance with the Laws, must be published periodically, permanently updated, provided and published in a structured way in order to facilitate their identification and research.

Despite these forecasts, practice is showing on many occasions that although the majority of public organizations are complying with the provisions of the Transparency Laws, this fact has not meant the achievement of a good level of public transparency, given that in some cases updating the data involves an organizational effort that has not been properly planned, and that has led to these portals publishing notoriously outdated data.

Obviously, whenever feasible, the best solution to keep transparency portals permanently up-to-date will be the automation of active advertising data from the source, that is, the automated extraction of indicators from the same administrative file that generates them.

Otherwise, one of the causes of these dysfunctions can be found, most likely, in the fact that some public organizations have not been able to internalize the change in culture that the opening of public data in its practical entirety entails.

In this sense, to strengthen the transition to this paradigm shift that involves the culture of transparency and for it to permeate the entire organization, it is recommended that the obligations of the Transparency Laws relating to the information that is published, 'incardinin in the normative body of each organization.

A possible solution would be the approval within the organization of a guide for updating active advertising indicators, where the agreement could be used to incorporate other indicators that the organization must update periodically.

Specifically, this guide should provide for each indicator, both the responsibilities and the frequency of its update, while also indicating if it wants to be more exhaustive, what are the individual limits at the time of its publication.

Legal context

Law 19/2014, of December 29, on transparency, access to public information and good governance :

Article 6. Obligations of transparency

"1. To make the principle of transparency effective, the obliged subjects must take the following actions:

a) Disseminate public information of general interest in a truthful and objective manner, so that people can learn about the performance and functioning of the Public Administration and exercise control over this performance.

b) Guarantee that the information referred to in letter a is constantly disseminated and permanently updated, with the express indication of the date on which it was last updated and, if possible, the date on which 'must update again.

c) Organize the information in a way that is easily accessible and comprehensible for people and that facilitates quick and agile consultation by means of search tools equipped with the technical characteristics that guarantee this.

d) Sort the information thematically so that it is easy and intuitive to locate. This arrangement must be done, at the very least, with thematic and chronological criteria, following the comparative documentary classification chart - if available - and incorporating indexes or reference guides.

e) Facilitate the consultation of information with the use of computer media in easily understandable formats that allow interoperability and reuse."

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