What is COINS data?

28 November 2012

What are the data?

On 28 November 2012, following the publication of the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) for 2010-11, the COINS raw data on which they were based were released. This is in addition to the raw data released on 21 September 2012, for the other COINS data streams, for the years 2007-08 to 2011-12. As with previous COINS data releases, certain data have been redacted.

This is the second release of WGA data, following that for WGA 2009-10 released in December 2011. That data, and the files relating to all other COINS raw data releases, commencing in 2010, remain available.

Please be aware that changes were made to COINS during 2011 which have impacted on some of the “tags” (or “fields”) used; these mostly involve the removal, or other actions taken against redundant “tags”, and the addition of new “tags”. These changes are reflected in the data released from September 2011 onwards. Please see “Understanding the COINS data” document where these changes are detailed.

The COINS data released are essentially made up of four separate parts:

Plans – this comprises authorised departmental spending;
Outturn - actual spending for years that have completed;
Forecast Outturn – monthly in-year outturn (estimated actuals for months that have ended) and forecasts (for future months);
Audited Outturn – year end statutory accounts data for the public sector.

The Plans, Outturn and Forecast Outturn data focus on income and expenditure and contain limited balance sheet information. Audited Outturn data include income and expenditure and balance sheet information.

Data are recorded within each of these streams against a complex coding structure that is used to produce the publications issued by the Treasury and the ONS. Departments supply data throughout the year to meet the internal timetables for the different data streams.

Updates to Plans and Outturn (for years that have been completed) are generally made through adjustment journals. These are mostly uploaded onto COINS by departments and can be found in the “adjustment table”. Some data are loaded directly onto COINS – this includes all Forecast Outturn returns as well as the initial estimate of Outturn spending and Audited Outturn data. The ‘fact table’ contains both the data loaded through the ‘adjustment table’ and the data loaded directly. As a result, while either the “fact table” and “adjustment table” can generally be used to view complete Plans data, only the “fact table” will contain complete Outturn data. Both the “fact table” and “adjustment table” are required for a complete Audited Outturn data set.

Updates to Forecast Outturn are made each month and are recorded as a different version each time. The first return of the financial year is labelled ‘Forecast Outturn June’.

Updates to Audited Outturn are made once a year. Audited Outturn data is based on the statutory accounts of each entity, which are mapped to a common format and uploaded onto COINS. COINS holds Audited Outturn data for each entity, either directly or as part of sub-consolidations of data based on departmental families or other groupings e.g. English local authorities.

Periodically Treasury takes a ‘snapshot’ of the database to provide a foundation for the published outputs. Each snapshot contains certain key fields from the Plans or Outturn data stream.

Where does the data come from?

Data are provided by central government departments, who retain ownership of their data on COINS. They do not include individual transactions, such as invoice payments, but aggregate transaction for reporting to Treasury. The way in which individual transactions are aggregated is largely a matter for each department, as long as they meet the minimum requirements defined by the Treasury. The level of data can, therefore, vary between departments.

Departments will generally provide the level of detail that maps most conveniently from their accounting systems, and those used by other members of the departmental family. For Audited Outturn this mapping is subject to audit review.

In addition to this, the Treasury loads onto COINS data that cannot be directly loaded by entities because they do not have access to COINS, for example local government data and data relating to central funds (such as the Reserve) and other aggregates (e.g. central government debt interest) that are required for publications. Plans, Outturn and Forecast Outturn data are predominantly concerned with income and expenditure with some limited balance sheet data, while Audited Outturn (WGA) data reflects the full extent of each entity’s statutory accounts.

What the data will tell you

With the exception of Audited Outturn data, all of the data contained in COINS are recorded against multiple coding frameworks, with the same piece of data being used in combination with various other pieces of data to produce the documents that Treasury publishes. The way in which these data are combined is complex, and may not be immediately obvious.

Updates to Plans and Outturn information are recorded as adjustments in the ‘adjustment table’, as noted above. These can initially be entered as “draft” by a department. “Draft” adjustments are updated to “submitted” before being “approved” or “rejected” by the Treasury. As a consequence an update to Plans information can be shown multiple times in the database.

Updates to Audited Outturn are also recorded as “draft” adjustments before finally moving to the “submitted” status.

Forecast Outturn is supplied on a monthly basis throughout the year. Each return comprises data for all twelve months of the current financial year, the initial return in June comprising two outturn months and ten forecast months.

Each subsequent return will contain an additional outturn month and one fewer forecast month. Certain Forecast Outturn returns are copied into the Outturn data stream (directly into the ‘fact table’) where they are used to publish estimates of annual spending during the year (for example in the Budget). Once the final return is copied into the Outturn data stream, departments load adjustments (through the ‘adjustment table’) to align firstly with their draft resource accounts and then to audited accounts.

To publish consistent historical time series data departments are required to maintain COINS data consistent with latest definitions for the most recent five outturn years, plus current and up to five future years – the ‘live’ years on COINS. This means that, for example, departments adjust all live years to reflect Machinery of Government changes (decision to change the responsibilities of departments) or other classification changes (such as changes to the budgeting framework or ONS decisions on the classification of organisations). It should be noted, however, that Plans data for past years are not maintained along these lines – these are fixed at the end of each year. Therefore, Plans and Outturn data for historic years will not necessarily be comparable. This maintenance excludes Forecast and Audited Outturns which relate to a single year only at a point in time, and are never changed.

A word of caution: Within the Treasury pre-defined aggregates, departments can choose the level of granularity at which they record spending data. Departmental data are therefore recorded on COINS at different levels of detail. Moreover, the same department may choose to record data on COINS at different levels of granularity in different years and/or for different entities within the departmental group. The mapping of Audited Outturn data is subject to independent audit review, and therefore within each entity there should be consistency year on year, and the degree of variability across entities should be more limited.

What the data won’t tell you

Departments may record data for Plans at a less detailed level than for Outturn and Forecast Outturn. As a consequence, comparisons of detailed Plans and Outturn data will not necessarily reflect genuine over- or under-spends. In addition, you may not be able to make comparisons between departments at a detailed level, as departments can, to a large extent, choose the detail at which they report spending on COINS.

COINS does not necessarily hold spending data against individual programmes or projects. Departments will have determined their aggregate level structure for reporting in COINS in consultation with their relevant Select Committee.

It is possible that you won’t be able to recreate the numbers that Treasury or ONS have published. This is because:

COINS has a single structure that is updated to reflect the latest classification of spend and organisation of government. The snapshots taken by the Treasury at defined points (e.g. to enable reports to be published) contain certain key fields, which then reference the latest structure. Any changes to the structure since the report was published may mean that it is not possible to recreate published figures;
of the time difference between the publication of aggregated information and this release of data, with the potential that data have been updated between the differing points in time; and
not all the data used to calculate these numbers are sourced from COINS.

Please note the Audited Outturn (WGA) data does not include segment (programme object) data

OSCAR: On 21 September we published the first additional datasets from OSCAR (previously they had been published from COINS data) the datasets includes:

Monthly in year data for the current year (2012-13)

The OSCAR dataset was released as both Excel files and CSV files.

What is COINS data?

What are the data?

Where does the data come from?

What the data will tell you

What the data won’t tell you

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COINS information