From the 2026 budget audit
You gave the state your data by law. Now a state company is funded to find new uses for it.
The National Data Asset Agency holds and commercially develops the aggregate of records citizens were legally obliged to provide — to the tax authority, the registries, the health system — for purposes entirely different from what the agency now does with them.
260 Ft per taxpayer per year — 1,040.6 million Ft total for an agency whose mandate bundles a public-data portal with an active commercial-servicing operation built on involuntarily surrendered records.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: a national data portal and a state agency developing AI-based data services from the aggregate of records the state holds. The unseen: every citizen who provided their data to the tax authority, the health system, and the registries under legal obligation — for the specific purposes the law named — and whose data is now the raw material for a transfer-financed state company tasked with finding additional value in the aggregate.
Objection
"But open data portals are a good thing — making public data available helps businesses, researchers, and citizens."
Answer
The portal function is kept and migrates to the KSH — the body that already publishes statistics, already earns 800.8 million Ft in fee income for bespoke data services, and already demonstrates that genuine demand for data analysis can be met by the body that holds the data. What ends is the separate transfer-financed agency whose mandate extends to exploiting and commercially servicing the aggregate of records assembled by legal compulsion. That is not a data-publication function; it is a discretionary commercial operation on a captive dataset. Where there is genuine demand, the fee-service model the KSH already runs covers it.
Share if you think the state should publish the data it holds — but not run a commercial operation on the records citizens were legally required to provide.
The analyst's verdict
Support for NAVU — National Data Asset Agency Ltd.
Rationale
The Nemzeti Adatvagyon Ügynökség (NAVÜ — National Data Asset Agency) is a state-owned limited-liability company whose ownership rights were transferred to the KSH in February 2024, having previously sat with the Digitális Magyarország Ügynökség. Under the governing decree its mandate is the management of the "national data asset": it operates the national public-data portal, maintains the registry and inventory of public data, and provides data-analysis and data-service functions — including, per the decree, the examination of AI-based data services and the development of data-management methodology. This line raises a different question from STATEK. STATEK does work the statistics office plainly needs and is best read as a duplication of form. NAVÜ does something the analytical frame does not recognise as a core state function at all. Two activities are bundled inside the agency's mandate, and they must be separated. The first is the public-data portal — the publication of data the state already holds, in open, machine-readable form. To the extent that is genuinely the publication of records the state holds for rule-of-law reasons (registers, statistical series, the legal record), it is a thin add-on to functions already funded elsewhere: the KSH already publishes statistics, the registry-holding bodies already maintain their registries, and exposing what is already held through a portal is a marginal IT cost, not a freestanding agency. The second activity is the one the decree's language makes explicit and that the frame squarely rejects: "data hasznosítás" — the exploitation and commercial servicing of the state's accumulated data, the development of AI-based data services, the agency as an active intermediary monetising or brokering the data citizens were compelled to provide to the state for entirely different purposes. A state agency that gathers the data its citizens were legally obliged to surrender — to the tax authority, the registries, the statistics office, the health system — and then stands up a commercial-servicing operation on top of that involuntary collection is not performing a rights-protection function, not securing a constitutional precondition, and not responding to an irreversible involuntary harm. It is a discretionary state activity built on an asset assembled by compulsion. The honest description is the one the euphemism "national data asset management" conceals: the citizen provided the data under legal obligation, for the purpose the law specified, and a state company is now funded to find further uses for it. Where there is genuine value in analysing public data, the analysis is performed by the bodies that hold the data for their lawful purpose — the KSH for statistics, each registry for its registry — under the legal limits that attach to each holding. A freestanding agency whose purpose is to extract additional value from the aggregate is a function the frame does not keep. The portal and the data-inventory function fold back into the KSH and the registry holders as a marginal publication cost; the data-exploitation function ends. The 3-year horizon, again, reflects the transition rather than a reluctance to act. The agency's staff are the protected party, and the portal — to the extent it publishes data citizens and businesses now use — should not go dark abruptly. The genuine publication function and its staff migrate to the KSH; the data-exploitation function is wound down.
Transition mechanism
Phase-Out over 3 years. Year 1: separate the agency's two activity strands — the public-data portal and inventory (which migrates to the KSH as a publication function) and the data-exploitation and AI-data-service operation (which is wound down). Read NAVÜ's accounts to size each strand. Years 2-3: transfer the portal function and its operating staff onto the KSH establishment, wind up the data-exploitation operation, and let the transfer line fall to zero. The protected parties — the staff running the genuine publication function — transfer to the KSH; staff on the data-exploitation side, a group with marketable data and IT skills, are covered by severance-with-overlap on the standard 24-month basis as they move to private-sector employment. The net chapter saving is the data-exploitation envelope plus the corporate-shell overhead; the portal's marginal publication cost stays. As with STATEK, the chapter's tables do not split the transfer into its components, so the precise saving is established from the agency's accounts in the first transition year.
Affected groups
NAVÜ's staff. Those running the genuine public-data publication function transfer to the KSH; those on the data-exploitation side are covered by a 24-month severance-with-overlap bridge into private-sector data and IT employment, where the skills are in demand. Users of the public-data portal retain access to the genuine publication function, which continues under the KSH. The activity that ends is the commercial servicing of data assembled by state compulsion — an activity that has no protected reliance the frame recognises.
Sources
- A KSH-hoz kerültek a Nemzeti Adatvagyon Ugynokseg tulajdonosi jogai · Hirado.hu (2024)
- 250/2024. (VIII. 15.) Korm. rendelet a Nemzeti Adatvagyon Ugynokseg feladatairol es az adathasznositas-tamogatasi szolgaltatasokrol · Hatalyos Jogszabalyok Gyujtemenye / Nemzeti Jogszabalytar (2024)
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