Fiscal Policy How to Check Integrity of Fiscal Data published by IMF (2016).
This note provides guidance on how to detect issues with data quality, perform integrity checks, and reconcile fiscal data from various sources. The first section discusses the importance of reconciliation to provide reasonable assurance on the quality and reliability of government fiscal data, the second section explores the main reasons for which discrepancies may arise, the third section describes how to assess the quality of fiscal data, and the fourth section explains how to conduct quality checks. The note concludes with recommendations for country teams of concrete steps to ensure data quality. Annex 1 covers in more detail the procedures to perform bank reconciliations by country authorities. Annex 2 identifies the common sources of the main line items of a fiscal table. Finally, Annex 3 presents two country examples (Malawi and Nicaragua) of reconciliation of fiscal and financing data.
