The DATA Act

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) is the law establishing federal standards for financial data and a new reporting process for agencies to improve data quality, transparency, and accountability

History

The DATA Act was signed into Public Law 113-101 on May 9, 2014.

Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 or the DATA Act - (Sec. 2) States as the purposes of this Act to:

• expand the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 by disclosing direct federal agency expenditures and linking federal contract, loan, and grant spending information to federal programs to enable taxpayers and policy makers to track federal spending more effectively;
• establish government-wide data standards for financial data and provide consistent, reliable, and searchable government-wide spending data that is displayed accurately for taxpayers and policy makers on USASpending.gov;
• simplify reporting for entities receiving federal funds by streamlining reporting requirements and reducing compliance costs while improving transparency;
• improve the quality of data submitted to USASpending.gov by holding federal agencies accountable for the completeness and accuracy of the data submitted; and
• apply approaches developed by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to spending across the federal government.

• Congress.gov Bill
• Public Law 113-101 PDF

For more information, see the History of the DATA Act

Execution

The result is an ongoing partnership between the federal community and external stakeholders to create a standard data model and a publicly accessible and searchable website: USAspending.gov.

Today, more than 100 federal agencies submit financial data to USAspending.gov on a monthly basis, and thousands of public users visit the site every day to access data via visualizations, downloads, and open APIs.

For how the DATA Act and USASpending.gov are managed, visit the Data Act Workflow.