The mystery of subsidies in Catalonia: a million missing data points

BarcelonaCompiling all the grants awarded in Catalonia on a website that acts as a search engine, filtered by beneficiary and showing who grants them. That's what 32-year-old Gerard Martínez Adsuar, from Caldes de Montbui, has done, sparking a public debate this week with the viral success of Subvencions.cat. Why? The website suddenly stopped working and was restored after a few days. The outage, however, resulted in the loss of one million records. This data became inaccessible from the Catalan government's portals. The government has justified the outage by citing problems with the data "upload," which they assure will be resolved soon. Well done, Martínez Adsuar. He already put forward his hypothesis on Thursday night on X"Before the change, proper names appeared, often those of migrants, associated with a tax identification number (CIF) that belonged to associations. I don't think this should have happened."

The leader of the PP, Alejandro FernándezHe brought the issue to the Catalan Parliament this week when he accused the Catalan government of "censoring websites," lamenting the "waste" of resources on subsidies, referring to the nearly €5 billion distributed annually. The deputy spokesperson for Junts in the Spanish Congress, Josep Maria Cruset, also has addressed the issue On social media, people are asking the executive branch to "clarify what they have removed from the database" and saying that, "otherwise, any other information the Catalan government might publish will lack credibility." However, on social media, the Aliança Catalana group has been the most vocal, using platforms like E-Notícies and Catalunya Woke. So, beyond the political reactions, how does Subvencions.cat work, and what do the missing data explain?

Gerard Martínez Adsuar created an easy-to-understand website about subsidies and another about public procurement. In a conversation with ARA, he says he decided to launch this portal "for transparency," because "data being public is not the same as data being accessible." "This is a weekend project. I did it on a lazy Sunday; I dedicated eight hours to the procurement website and another eight to the subsidies website," he maintains. This project,The app, which has a lifespan of just over ten days, has developed so rapidly thanks to artificial intelligence, which allows for the "automation" of data, he explains. The programmer, a self-taught business administration graduate, runs a company called Cienciadedades.cat that develops applications focused on data analysis. Martínez Adsuar has been "surprised" by the viral spread and political impact of what he created in his spare time, after generating 30,000 pages from 5,000 users in a single day. Despite this, he understands the debate surrounding it due to the vast resources involved. He admits that it has resonated "especially with the far right"—and says he doesn't support them under any circumstances—but wonders why transparency doesn't concern the left. "Some people were pointing fingers at groups like Muslim associations or anti-homophobia groups; I think we need to debate without singling out specific groups," he concludes, criticizing the absurdities published in X.

The portal stop

Why did the website go down two days ago? The conflict with the Catalan government stems from the fact that access to grant data was cut off. It was at 1:45 p.m. on Tuesday when the data from the Catalan government's Department of Economy, which feeds the website, went from being public to "private and inaccessible" and "for no apparent reason." Initially, Martínez Adsuar found the "technical problems" explanation without further clarification "strange." Access to the data was restored on Wednesday afternoon, although, according to him, a million records were lost, corresponding to grants awarded by municipalities. This is where his hypothesis comes in, which he elaborated on social media the day after his conversation with this newspaper: "The anonymization process wasn't done entirely correctly" by the administrations, and the way to fix "the error" was to "filter out those agencies for which they suspected the anonymization control hadn't been effective enough." "It's a logical explanation that, on the one hand, is very human because it covers up a mistake and, on the other hand, explains why partial explanations are being given that, frankly, can sound like excuses," he retorted.

Sources from the Department of Economy clarified to ARA that "it's a technical problem that is being resolved," but that for now they cannot "specify a timeframe," although they are working to resolve it "as soon as possible." They also maintain that "data on grants affecting local governments are available, until the issue with the Generalitat's platform is resolved, in the National Grants Database." And they emphasize that the only data not yet available on the Department of Economy's website are those from the municipalities. They note, in this regard, that since Wednesday, "the Generalitat's grant data has been available again." Well, when asked specifically about Martínez Adsuar's theory—which is also supported by analyst David Poblador—they commented that they cannot provide any more information than what has already been detailed, without going into the details of the technical problem.

From conflict to debate

Albert Cuesta, a journalist specializing in new technologies and a contributor to ARA, reminds this newspaper that he is aware the Center for Telecommunications and Information Technologies, which is responsible for fixing these issues, has stated that the Generalitat (Catalan government) is updating all its websites, which entails file changes. "It's plausible that the system crashed due to an import error," he adds. Following the analyses by Martínez Adsuar and Poblador, Cuesta says he agrees that data was removed if it contained "sensitive personal information," but with a caveat: "It's unacceptable to give us a generic excuse ('migration error') to hide the fact that the initial corpus was flawed," he maintains. "Another issue is why we have to maintain two databases," he tells this newspaper, "with the risk that they won't be synchronized." He also points out that the string of subsidies now being criticized has a long history.