Credibility on the (Bottom) Line: The Fiscal Accountability of Canada's Senior Governments, 2013
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Each spring, Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial legislatures vote budgets that set out their spending and revenue goals for the fiscal year. Budget votes are critical for holding governments accountable to legislators, and in turn to voters and taxpayers. Over the last decade, however, Canada’s senior governments have overshot their spending targets by some $47 billion combined. More accuracy in hitting budgeted amounts would have made today’s taxes and public debt lower. A related problem is deficiencies in financial reporting. In many provinces and territories, the average citizen or legislator would have trouble simply finding and comparing the key numbers in the budget and in the end-of-year financial reports. While Ottawa and Ontario prepare their principal financial documents using the same basis of accounting, display the relevant numbers prominently, and provide informative reconciliations between budgets and results, in most of the other provinces and territories, inconsistent presentations of multiple revenue and spending figures would stump any but the most expert reader. Our 2013 fiscal accountability survey of Canada’s senior governments’ evaluates the clarity and adherence to public sector accounting standards in each government’s budgets and public accounts, and assigns letter grades to each one. It also shows the results of a straightforward attempt to overcome varied financial presentations across the country by comparing budgeted to actual changes in spending and revenue. This exercise shows a substantial overshoot of spending – and an even larger overshoot of projected revenues – over the past decade. Expressed as percentages of their budgeted expenditures in the current fiscal year to allow comparisons, Alberta and Saskatchewan showed the biggest overshoots among the provinces – averaging about 4 and 5 percent – over the period, while Yukon and Nunavut were even worse. The news is not all bad, however. Over the most recent five years, most of Canada’s senior governments came closer to both their spending and revenue targets than they had during the previous five years. Our survey concludes with several suggestions about how Canada’s senior governments can improve their financial reporting, and with it the ability of legislators and voters to hold them to account for hitting their budget targets.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it