Civio 2023 Management report

We demand that public authorities be accountable, and with this report, we lead by way of example. Read in detail about what we’ve done over the previous year.

Journalism and action to unlock the public sector

We are the first organisation in Spain to specialise in monitoring and reporting on the public sector in an attempt to improve it. We seek transparent governments and institutions, and informed people, and we lead by way of example. Here, we explain in detail how we have used journalism, advocacy and technology in the last year to achieve these aims.

This is our 10th Management Report, an exercise we conduct every year with enthusiasm, honesty and a critical approach, to uphold the trust so many people place in us and to win more over every day. You can also check the reports from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014.

Public service journalism

In 2023, we published some 55 reports and analyses of the public sector, based on daily monitoring of the BOE, the official government gazette. This is slightly less than other years, mainly due to reduced government activity during the period in office.

For example, we translated into layman’s terms the pension reforms, the Youth Culture Coupon, the new private copying levy, the single test to practise as a lawyer or solicitor, the new recruitment incentives and related allowances, the special unemployment benefit for artists and technicians and the increase in the minimum wage to 1,080 euros, as well as its evolution over time.

We scrutinised the increase to the maximum dependent care benefits, , and we certainly didn’t let the 4 pardons granted this year to Holy Week Confraternities, slip past us, nor the “sporting merit” awarded to beer producers or the 59 bills that hadn’t been passed by the end of the government’s term in office. We also focused on the lists of candidates announced for the 23rd July elections; on nationality granted by decree to athletes and political opponents; the measures to tackle drought, heat and lack of water, the reasons for exemption from serving at a polling station, who will be able to access, upon payment, the register of beneficial ownerships, the withdrawal of the medal of Merit at Work awarded to Franco and eight high-ranking officials from the dictatorship and the the final decree of the most recent legislature.

🎙️The truth is in there

Our slot on ’A Vivir’, a SER radio programme, to inform you all about the unresolved mysteries in public sector management. You can listen to all of the audios here.

Investigations

In 2023 we published 20 investigations and reports:

  • Pseudo-therapies at public authorities. We analysed contracts between hospitals, mutual insurance societies, town halls and even the National Ballet, and acupuncture, osteopathy and other types of therapy services with no scientific foundation. This work received the Sceptical Magnifying Glass Award from the Society for the Advancement of Critical Thinking 🏆.

  • The strange case of the executive decrees that took weeks to be published in the BOE. An untold story of our legislative process.

  • Mandatory digital bureaucracy. Ever more procedures are dealt with online, and online only. The authorities refuse to explain why they block these, by default, from being dealt with in person.

  • Putting a stop to pardons in 2022. We analysed the 18 pardons approved in 2022, a year in which the Executive slowed the pace of granting pardons, which had skyrocketed since it came to power.

  • Invisible queues at Social Security. For two weeks, three times a day, a Civio robot tried to get an appointment with Social Security, to deal with pensions and the Minimum Living Wage. What happened won’t surprise you. Then again, maybe it will.

We published this research in El País, and it was also referred to on Cadena SER, Telemadrid, COPE and in regional media from Asturias, Aragon, Catalonia, Navarra, Basque Country and Tarragona, among other regions. Civio’s findings also made their way to the Congress of Deputies.

  • Two different speeds to obtain Spanish nationality. We investigated the two extremes of the process of acquiring Spanish nationality: the preferential, fast-track and hand-picked system of legitimisation, and the ordinary route, which is nationality by residence, and which can face years and years of delay.

  • Postcodes have a greater influence than imagined on the type of benefits and services a person has a right to. These are invisible barriers, but they imply obvious inequality between one autonomous region and another. For example, access to non-invasive prenatal tests.

  • Who spends (the most) on tasers? In the last eight years, public authorities have shelled out almost six million euros for weapons that immobilise through electric shocks. Let’s take a look at the contracts.

  • Minimum Living Wage: is anybody there?. 18 days of phoning every half an hour, using a robot, to get someone to answer the MLW helpline. On the 151st attempt, we finally got through to a human being.

Media such as El Salto, Critic, TV3, Ara, El Periódico, Público, Diari de Barcelona, Periódico de Ibiza, Diario de Mallorca, Praza and others have reported on this investigation.

Objectives set out in the 2023 Action Plan:

Maintain and update current media projects, fostering improvements and expanding impact

Our Tools

We continue to make publicly accessible, free tools available to all. In 2023:

  • The online Minimum Living Wage Assistant was used on more than 10,700 occasions this year.

  • This app, which lets you know who is eligible for the electricity discount rate and facilitates your application, has been used over 47,200 times throughout 2023, and more than one million since its launch.

  • We have kept our Civio Responds consultancy service active, providing a valuable hub where we answer questions and guide our readers. It focuses specifically on pandemic-related subsidies, and we have answered more than 3,030 enquiries.

  • 20,557 users consulted the healthcare saturation finder for their particular division and health centre.

  • More than 94,000 people used Where do my taxes go? to easily explore the General State Budgets.

  • The app Spain in Flames, designed to interactively explore detailed information on major forest fires, was checked over 30,000 times.

  • El Indultómetro, an accountability tool to search for pardons de El Indultómetro, was used 4,000 times.

  • Almost 300 enquiries in the search engine for emergency contracts in 2020, the most comprehensive database on this topic to date.

  • Contratopedia, our guide to how public contracts work, was checked about 10,000 times.

Objectives set out in the 2023 Action Plan:

Facilitate tools and processes that reinforce citizens' ability to monitor public authorities.

Pro-transparency advocacy

These have been our main activities in 2023.

Confidential medicine prices

For years we have been fighting, even in the courts, to advocate that the real prices and financing terms of medicines be publicly available. The greatest milestone this year has been securing two judgments at first instance that, for the first time, ratify the pricing and financing conditions of medicines being made public: one for Luxturna and another for Zolgensma, both Novartis drugs. Although the laboratory has appealed, these are encouraging rulings that defend the public interest in such information regarding the private interests of laboratories. Here, you can check the status of all our court cases on the price of medicines.

Opaque algorithms

In 2020, our fight for transparency in authorities’ use of automated decision-making systems suffered its first setback. A court found in favour of the Government’s arguments to deny us the right to analyse the source code of the app that decides who is deemed a vulnerable consumer and therefore has the right to the discount rate for electricity. We have appealed this decision to the National High Court (and the order to pay costs of up to EUR 2,000 imposed on us), and we are still waiting.

In the meantime, we have collaborated on the implementation of a coalition of organisations which calls for guarantees, controls and the participation of civil society in the European AI (Artificial Intelligence) Regulations. The main purpose: to ensure these systems pose no risk of amplifying social inequality.

Secret company sanctions

We are battling in the courts to make public all sanctions by the Labour Inspectorate on companies that violate the law. The Transparency Council argued in favour of the right-to-know and ordered the Ministry of Labour to give a hearing to the affected third parties, i.e., the sanctioned entities, and rule again on our request for access. However, the department headed by Yolanda Díaz took us to court to avoid being held accountable for their sanctioning activity, while leaking to the press—in a timely and self-serving manner—some of the fines imposed by the Labour Inspectorate (as can be seen here and here). We want to know who is breaking the law, for example, by discriminating against women because they are pregnant, hiring fake freelancers or not taking the appropriate measures to prevent occupational risks. In other words, taking things one step further, as we did previously with the activity of the Madrid Health inspections, and with the fines from the Spanish Data Protection Agency. The courts have overturned the Ministry’s reasoning and at Civio, we won’t be giving up. Why is this information denied to the public? We are still fighting to make it available.

Putting transparency back on the agenda

As with every election since 2015, we have demanded commitments of transparency from political parties Not just long-awaited promises that are never fulfilled (such as the regulation of lobbying, improvements to the Transparency Law, the publication of senior officials’ work diaries or the unlocking of the commercial registry). We also seek transparency in new contexts, such as clear and easy access to public services and subsidies, and for decisions made using AI, algorithms, and automated systems.

In 2023, Civio participated in the preliminary public consultation on reforming the Transparency Law, but the end of the parliamentary term brought this attempt at reform to an end. We also contributed to the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP)’s new standard ordinance on public transparency, a framework text that is key to helping local authorities, especially smaller ones, to adapt their regulations in line with transparency requirements and the right of access to information. We also appeared before MPs from the Madrid Assembly to warn about the Government of Madrid’s blow to transparency, which seeks to take away independence and power from the regulatory body under the guise of urgent ”streamlining”.

Objective set out in the 2023 Action Plan:

Improve transparency in public administration, increasing the information available on governmental activity and promoting access to this for all citizens.

Increase the capacity of civil society to better engage in public processes.

Prominence

  • We registered at least 290 hits in the media. Of these, 55% were in national newspapers, 37% in regional and local papers, and the remaining 8% in international ones.

  • Civio registered some 1 million unique readers. However, Civio’s reach beyond our own website was much greater than these metrics suggest, thanks to partner media sharing our content.

  • We released 20 datasets for public use; there are now 150 in total. These were downloaded 760 times, 8,876 since the launch of Datos.civio.es.

  • Throughout the year we participated in 29 training sessions and outreach activities, with over a thousand attendees in total.

  • In 2023 we participated in and delivered training at international events such as the European Conference on Investigative Journalism (EIJC)- Dataharvest in Mechelen (Belgium); the International Journalism Forum 2023 iMEdD, in Athens (Greece) and the Graphic Hunter S-H-O-W, in Utrecht (The Netherlands), as well as the Digital Freedom Fund, in Berlin (Germany). We also featured at national events such as GeoCamp on the island of San Simón (Vigo), the Decidim Fest (Barcelona) and at workshops by Andalusian Ombudsman in Granada and the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia. Additionally, we participated in meetings and workshops in Paris (through the EDJNet network) and Budapest.

iMEdD International Journalism Forum 2023

  • In April we had a meeting with members in Barcelona, at the invitation of Marc, one of our members from the Bofill Foundation. We also met members and friends in A Coruña thanks to the Dos Dereitos Office, which invited us to talk at length about the maze of bureaucracy in the authorities.

Meeting in Barcelona

  • We launched a new newsletter, Civio in the Rough, a fortnightly publication exclusively for subscribers about the trials and tribulations, vexations and obsessions of our team. Oh, and it has also served to discover María’s talent as an illustrator. If you still haven’t received yours, you can sign up here.

Ilustration by María Álvarez del Vayo

Team

The Foundation’s Board of Trustees has remained unchanged since the 2018 replacements, its members being: Rodrigo Tena (notary and member of the Hay Derecho Foundation), Javier de la Cueva (lawyer), José Luis Marín (Euroalert), Marisol García (RAIS Foundation), Olivier Schulbaum (Goteo) and the two Civio founding members (Jacobo Elosua and David Cabo).

Christmas meeting 2023

At the start of 2023, Ángela Bernardo, until then Civio’s health and public policy editor, was promoted to a new deputy-director role in the organisation. We also recruited Adrián Maqueda as a front-end developer and data visualiser, as well as Ter García as a journalist specialising in human rights. There are still 10 full-time employees.

Accounts

For another year running, we can report positive financial results. In 2023, we made a profit after tax of EUR 43,405,12.

Income reached EUR 506,375.99, a 10% increase on the forecast from the Action Plan drafted before the start of the financial year. However, expenses amounting to EUR 462,960.83 were in line with the initial budget, with a variation margin of less than 1%, hence the final profit.

The major share of expenses goes on staff salaries, which account for 84% of the total. The team’s salaries range from €24,840 to the €42,265 that our directors earn.

As for where the income came from, we have made steady progress to increase the percentage of financing coming from individual donations (34%), and continue to boost this source of funds. Regarding our ties with major funders, we have resumed our collaboration with the Open Society Foundation, which is supporting us with biannual funding (2023 and 2024), and also established a new partnership with the Limelight Foundation, with which we will be conducting a project lasting until 2026.

Objective set out in the 2023 Action Plan:

Maintain the organisation's sustainability through growth. Anticipated revenue was exceeded.

Increase the number of members and donors at a sufficient rate to provide us greater stability and independence compared to other sources of funding.

Miscellaneous

With the exception of 2020, the year of Covid, 2023 was the best year for the growth of membership.

In May 2023, we carried out a campaign under the banner Let’s Change the Rules”, which stemmed from the pride we take in doing things differently in terms of our model and product.

Ilustration by Byron Maher

In December, the campaign shone a spotlight on what we intend to do or achieve in 2024. You can read the content here. In terms of new membership numbers, 2023 was our best year-end campaign since 2012.

  • Until even your sister-in-law is reading us. Let us tell you a couple of things about the passion and effort we put into getting our stories out into the world, as well as everything we’d like to improve with your support in 2024.

  • For everything we have still to investigate. The list of topics to shed light on is huge. But we can only sink our teeth into them as thoroughly and rigorously as they deserve with further support. We explain all here.

  • Now it’s time to fix the flaws. We realise there are many things in the public sector that don’t work properly. And we want to change them, but we need a big push to achieve that. We’ll explain all about what we will be doing next year, if you lend us a hand to do it.

  • Together, we will go far. They say that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. At Civio we’re firm believers in that maxim. Because together, we can work wonders.

Acknowledgements

We continue to pursue real and measurable impact, and over these years, we have achieved significant changes for the collective good. None of it would be possible without a lot of people, more every day, who push us to continue promoting transparency and accountability with greater determination than ever. Their names would take up more space than this entire report. Our most heart-felt thanks to all:

  • First and foremost, to the over 1,800 members who support us today. Living up to the trust you put in us is our top priority. None of this would be possible without you.

  • To all of the people who have worked selflessly with us in 2023. For example, via the Civio Community.

  • To all the public authorities and employees who have listened to us to find ways of opening up institutions to citizens.

  • To the media who trust in our projects, and to all of those who republish our content to reach more and more people every day.

  • To the dozens of organisations that, in Spain and abroad, share their formidable knowledge with us.

  • To the millions of people who take an interest in our work and share it. We will strive to thoroughly and credibly demonstrate that, if you support us, it will be worth it.

This year we continue to perform the journalism that we believe in, and that our readers deserve: rigorous, monitoring power innovatively and completely transparently. With no obligation to subscribe and at no cost, because that’s how a public service should work. We will continue to push to ensure hiding behind institutional opacity comes at an unaffordable cost.

Our greatest triumph has been to close 2023 with you all by our side, and the hope of continuing to endeavour to achieve greater impact with your support.

Thanks for putting your trust in us!

Jacobo, David, Eva, Ángela, María, Olalla, Carmen, Ana, Adrián, Ter and Javi.

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