The Scientific Data journal published an article by the staff of EUSP’s Institute for the Rule of Law titled "Russian Financial Statements Database: A firm-level collection of the universe of financial statements" (the journal is part of the Nature group). The authors of the material are Sergey Bondarkov, Viktor Ledenev and Dmitry Skugarevsky.
The work describes the Russian Financial Statements Database — a longitudinal data set with financial statements of all Russian legal entities for 2011–2023, enriched with additional information.
Notably, the Russian Financial Statements Database (RFBD) became the first open-source alternative to commercial platforms like SPARK-Interfax, Ruslana, Kontur.Focus, and SBIS. Previously, researchers had to purchase data access, manually extract reports, and import them into statistical software. Now, financial statements for all companies can be retrieved with just a few lines of Python or R code.
The database is compiled from official sources — the Unified State Register of Legal Entities of the Federal Tax Service, archival data from Rosstat, and reports obtained through the State Information Resource of Accounting Reports (GIR BO). Currently, RBBO covers the years 2011–2023 and contains 56.6 million observations. An important difference between RBBO and commercial products is that it includes not only all annual unconsolidated reports of Russian organizations, but also information on organizations that have not submitted reports despite being legally obliged to do so.
Scientific Data maintains rigorous validation standards, making publication in the journal a mark of dataset quality. Coming soon in July, the project team will update RFBD by adding 2024 financial statements to the database.