Public agencies and open source

[Fabrizio Giudici]

I have a question for you, to put some news related to my country in an
international context.

The italian Reveune Office has been working for some time on policies to
contrast tax evasion. As part of these initiatives, they have prepared a
mathematical model which searches for gross inconsistencies between the
"life style" (= some kind of expenses) and tax declarations. They will use
this model as a first filter to search for cases to be submitted under a
deeper investigation. As part of their transparency policy they have
released an application which asks to citizens the same data used in the
model and then applies the model, telling users whether they fall in the
"regular" cases or those which are going to be investigated.

The application is a Java 7 web start application (surprise?). This makes
a lot of sense since people are concerned about their privacy: the Revenue
Office guarantees that no part of the collected data is sent to their
servers. Should they have a web application, this statement could be never
verified (*). With a standalone application, it *could* be possible to
verify it. The strange thing is that the source code of the application is
not released. I bet some people will decompile the jars (unless they are
obfuscated) and tell us how things are, but IMO the Revenue Office has
demonstrated a blatant lack of open source (**) culture, right in a place
where it would be useful.

As I'd like to blog about that, I'd like to know whether there are similar
cases in other countries.

Thanks.


(*) My assertion is not entirely true. The application could have been
done in JavaScript and entirely run within its web page, but for non
technical people I think that there would be a different perception.
(**) "Open source" intended as the freedom to change the code and
re-release it is actually an overkill requirement for the case: it would
suffice that the code is available, even though strictly copyrighted. But
let me use anyway the term open source for simplicity.

--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect @ Tidalwave s.a.s.
"We make Java work. Everywhere."
http://tidalwave.it/fabrizio/blog - fabrizio...@tidalwave.it

[Ricky Clarkson]

I can tell you that Argentina does that kind of profiling but without any such app available to my knowledge.  They 'get you' at random times or times of large transactions such as buying a house.

Argentina's style would be to provide a webapp where you enter your national ID (no password) and they tell you your status.  Cynically I'd say they'd add a couple of points when you do that.

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[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:41:20 +0100, Ricky Clarkson
<ricky.c...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I can tell you that Argentina does that kind of profiling but without any
> such app available to my knowledge. They 'get you' at random times or
> times of large transactions such as buying a house.
>
> Argentina's style would be to provide a webapp where you enter your
> national ID (no password) and they tell you your status.

Yes, we have that too. In this case a web app, other than needed, it's not
a privacy problem as it would handle data that you know and agree to be
shared.

[Ryan Schipper]

The Australian Taxation Office performs this sort of profiling also - no application has been made available.

[Jim Cheesman]

Code developed for the Spanish government is not released to the public, although projects developed for one ministry are (sometimes) made available to others. 

It's also important to note that a lot of the IT work sold to Spanish government bodies is based on products with closed source, the code for these products is sometimes held in escrow, but cannot be released as open source. 

A final point to bear in mind is the different levels of government - central, state, local, and that they all hate each other. This is not conducive to a mature and open sharing of costs and benefits.