Introducing @AusDisclosure , the Twitter bot that lets you know when an Australian political party has realised they’ve forgotten to declare a donation, and when a politician has declared a new gift or business interest

When Bill Shorten recently revealed previously undeclared donations totalling $70,000 from 2007, the Victorian branch of the Labor party filed an amendment to the Australian Electoral Commission.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Many political parties have had to make amendments, either because their lack of disclosure has been discovered by the AEC or a journalist doing some digging, or it’s a mistake that they’ve realised internally.

The New South Wales Liberals, for example, updated their donations declarations after Guardian Australia used data analysis techniques to discover an undeclared donation from the Restaurant and Catering Industry Association.

If Shorten’s amendment hadn’t been unearthed by a royal commission, and the NSW Liberals’ amendments had not been reported on, people may have never known about them.

As Crikey’s Bernard Keane points out: “Political parties routinely get away with declaring hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations years later, long after anyone has stopped scrutinising them. And it’s deliberate.”

Ordinarily, donations are scrutinised only when they are first released during early February. It’s at this point that journalists file a flurry of stories about which parties are being funded by whom, which party has the most money, and so on.

However after this initial coverage there is little scrutiny of donations aside from the occasional royal commission, or if a journalist is tipped off to look at something specific. Political parties are then able to amend their donations with the AEC, and rarely face penalties for such omissions.

The AEC’s website doesn’t help the situation, giving little visibility to donation amendments unless you check the six month period for a specific party.

It’s a similar story with the register of pecuniary interests, where members of parliament and senators are required to disclose gifts, positions in companies, investments, and other things. There’s a flurry of interest when the register is added for each new parliament, and then little is looked at.

You wouldn’t know, for example, that several senior politicians attended the AFL grand final, and also claimed travel expenses on the same dates, unless you knew to look for it.

This is why we have created a program that checks for donation amendments and updates to the register of interests every day. At the moment, the updates are published through a Twitter bot, @AusDisclosure.

DisclosureBot (@AusDisclosure) Mr Wyatt Roy has updated their interests register. http://t.co/puesN3UD6G

We plan to add an email subscription service for people who don’t use Twitter (once we work out the best way to manage subscriptions and mass mail without getting blacklisted!), and an automatically updated, searchable summary page on this site. We might also broaden the scope to include the lobbyist’s register, and when political donors receive government contracts.

It’s still very much a work in progress and has a few bugs, with obvious improvements that could be made, so please let us know if you spot something that doesn’t look quite right. Or maybe you’d like to suggest a feature we haven’t thought of? Let us know!

Update

Just to clarify – since we’ve received a few questions about it, it’s usual for politicians can update their interests register at any point (unlike donations) and this doesn’t represent an oversight on the part of the politician in the same way as donations.