Leveraging fiscal transparency to inform decision-making The COVID-19 pandemic required governments to manage public finances to meet urgent healthcare and welfare needs. It underscored the importance of ensuring that natural resource revenues contribute to public services and safety nets. Fiscal transparency can support governments in ensuring that extractive revenues contribute to development priorities. Detailed information about the terms of oil, gas and mining contracts, production and payments helps citizens and governments assess whether companies are paying what they should and whether state budgets are realistic, not least in periods of economic recession. Increasingly, governments, companies, analysts and civil society groups are drawing on EITI data to conduct financial modelling. This type of analysis can be a powerful tool for projecting future revenues from the sector and can help inform data-driven decisions that are sustainable in the long term. 16 Strengthening* revenue collection*