Whole of Government Accounts: the secret history

Today, for the first time ever, the government will publish the results of bringing together all of its accounts. This project is called the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA). The report will show the finances in the final year of Labour control - the financial year 2009-10.

It has taken over 10 years to bring together the accounts and report them publicly. The reasons it has taken this long have been largely secret.

Of course a project on this scale will take time. Big business frequently bring together the accounts of all their branches to give their overall company accounts. However the government is different as it is dealing with about 1500 bodies which is far in excess of what most businesses have to wrangle. The time consuming part of bringing accounts together is that exchanges of money between bodies in the same organisation need to be identified to avoid double counting.

But there is secrecy about why, in the 10 years of running this exercise, nothing has been published at all. This secrecy seem excessive given the project takes mostly public information from the annual accounts of each public body, and brings them together to form one set of consolidated accounts.

We can see exactly what HM Treasury, the department tasked with combining the accounts, has to deal with as they publish the excel sheets that each authority completes for WGA. We know that HM Treasury receives a balance sheet and a cash flow statement in an excel document from every public body, as the forms local authorities complete and the forms (excel) central government complete are available. You can also see two examples of completed forms from Lichfield District Council and Haringey Borough Council.

These balance sheets and cash flow statements are also published in the annual accounts, so have been publicly available for some time.

The Guardian has requested information on the Whole of Government Accounts project at various stages of its life.

The Whole of Government Accounts data is stored in the COINS database. But when COINS was published in June 2010 we observed that none of the WGA data was included. So we asked for it. This was rejected.

Then we asked for the audit report on the WGA. That was rejected too.

There was a round table discussion on the presentation of the WGA held in May. We were told that the media were not invited, however we have the list of invitees who were deciding the future of this project in the spreadsheet below.

Some of the secrecy might be because the project will report a new measure of national debt. Some might be because the full cost of public sector pensions will be exposed for the first time.

Some of the embarrassment might also be related to the costs of the private and public partnerships being included for the first time - to a limited extent, but still there.

If nothing else, the secrecy shows just how cautious the government is when bringing data together. Today we will see what they have to chosen to show.

Here is the data on who has a say over what is reported in the WGA, what would you like us to do with it?

Data summary

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