[open-government] How do other countries perform when it comes to procurement transparency?

Thu Oct 3 14:03:53 UTC 2013

Sorry for cross-posting.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/10/03/so-how-do-other-countries-perform-when-it-comes-to-procurement-transparency/

How do other countries perform when it comes to procurement
transparency?<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/10/03/so-how-do-other-countries-perform-when-it-comes-to-procurement-transparency/>
by Júlia Keseru <http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/jkeseru/>Oct. 3,
2013, 8:30 a.m.

The first thing to admit is that the title of this post might be a bit
misleading. While in the last few months Sunlight was indeed busy researching
procurement transparency on many different
levels<http://sunlightfoundation.com/issues/procurement-government/>,
we’ve never had the intention (or the power) to do holistic international
research on procurement transparency, nor did we want to rank countries
based on their performance. This would have been an endless - and probably
pointless - effort. Our motive behind mapping the global landscape of
procurement disclosure
trends<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/01/open-procuring-how-do-other-countries-perform/>
was
to find best practices, powerful online tools and also to gain inspiration
for Sunlight’s recently released open data guidelines for
procurements<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/09/09/announcing-sunlights-open-data-guidelines-for-procurement/>
.

We also have to admit that government procuring is a complex, fragmented
and rather confusing territory. So why care at all? Because it is also an
extremely corruption prone process affecting a wide range of sectors and
agencies and the GDPs of several nations. And also, because procurement
information - though not at all seen as sexy - is an unexplored gold mine
for data geeks and the whole open gov community, thanks to its potential to
serve as an important linkage between other politically relevant and many
times absent datasets such as spending data, company information and even
shadow campaign or party funding. Thus we hope that our research findings
and open data guidelines may prove useful for our peer organizations, let
alone national governments.
Procurement Openness Around The World

Our survey<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1naM_f6_fDSMpgueRutOV886G0zqY0K3riV7XxfVUjSw/viewform>
on
procurement disclosure practices was sent out to 54 countries to see
whether findings <http://www.oecd.org/gov/ethics/combined%20files.pdf> of
the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) on procurement
transparency matched the observations of the experts in practice. The
survey yielded 25 total responses and we ended up accumulating information
for 21 countries. Besides Japan and Uganda, all of the countries surveyed
are in Europe and the Americas, which is important to keep in mind when
drawing further conclusions. Some of our key initial finding include:

   -

   Procedural and pre-award information is almost always disclosed - a good
   sign for competition.
   -

   Contract awards and tender documents are also published in a reasonable
   manner.
   -

   Keeping track of the procurement process after the award stage is almost
   impossible in most countries - a bad sign for oversight.
   -

   Data is mostly available as individual documents in PDFs, hardly any
   bulk or machine-readable data disclosure.
   -

   There’s an increasing number of online tools built around procurement
   data (mostly for oversight purposes), an even though the potential is huge,
   only a few try to mix procurement info with other datasets or provide
   red-flagging mechanisms to detect waste, fraud or other types of wrongdoing.

Check out more details on our initial results in our
spreadsheet<https://docs.google.com/a/sunlightfoundation.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhECmY-CLA1hdHQ4STNKcEpoSS1RaHZ4YWFnNUxGZ2c&usp=drive_web#gid=0>
and
our summary below.
What Information Is Available?

Broadly speaking, we've found that procedural information and laws were
most easily accessed with the majority of countries always providing such
information. From there the trends are more difficult to mark. It does
seem, however, that selection and evaluation criteria as well as tender
documents and contract awards are published in a promising fashion in most
countries surveyed, which is good news for a more fair competition. Keeping
track of progress after the procurement bid has been awarded (such as
information on contract modifications or procurement spending) is way more
difficult. The categories most difficult to find information for are
 justifications for awarding contract, data on other bidders and
information on contract implementation including details on subcontractors,
where most countries do not provide information even when it is asked for.
The few notable exceptions are Greece, Colombia as well as the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland and Georgia where such information is sometimes
available.

This may be unsettling since this greatly undermines accountability and
makes it almost impossible to connect the dots or improve oversight.
Privacy issues and commercial confidentiality are serious - and hard to
ignore - factors here, however there are solid arguments for why, how and
when those more controversial data could and should be published. (More on
that in our procurement open data
guidelines<http://sunlightfoundation.com/procurement/opendataguidelines>
and
the global principles <http://www.open-contracting.org/global_principles> of
the Open Contracting team.) An interesting, and unfortunately rather unique
feature of the Georgian tender registry is a publicly available database of
blacklisted and whitelisted companies as well as a dispute resolution board
which publishes all its decisions online within 10 working days after a
complaint is filed.

[image: Procurement-Data-Availability]<http://sunlightfoundation.com/media/2013/10/Procurement-Data-Availability.png>Trends
in releasing procurement data in 21 countries.
Data Accessibility

Sunlight’s survey also asked for whether different countries had
procurement information published in text online. Most countries did
publish procurement information online, with few exceptions from those
surveyed. Generally the file formats that are most easily accessible are
PDFs, and the good news is that ¾ of those surveyed provided the
information in PDF format, and of the that did not provide information in
PDFs, many provided the information in text formats, which is also a
promising sign. However, only a few countries of those surveyed (the U.S.,
the U.K., Poland, Uruguay and the Czech Republic) had some information in
bulk data, with the majority of countries only having information in
individual documents. And again, we have to emphasize that our survey
covered American and European countries mostly.
Online Tools Built Around Procurement Data

Regarding free online tools built by civil society advocates, most of the
platforms we’ve seen are impressive databases that make procurement
information more searchable and analyzable. We have already written about
the Rospil<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/08/06/crowdsourcing-to-fight-corruption-aleksei-navalny-and-the-rospil-experiment/>
initiative
from Russia or TI Slovakia's open public procurement
website<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/08/12/case-study-public-procurement-in-the-slovak-republic/>.
Some of the other tools, such as Croatia’s
website<http://nabava.vjetrenjaca.org/> by
Marko Rakar from
Windmill<http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/croatian-transparency-activist-marko-rakar-making-waves-again>
provide
aggregated information on top clients, bidders and most procured sectors.
Ukraine's open procurement database <http://z.texty.org.ua/>enables
extensive research while TI Georgia’s tender
platform<http://tendermonitor.ge/en> provides
detailed profiles on procurers and suppliers, allows users to view
intuitive visualizations of key indicators and also provides bulk download.
Most of the tools have no red-flagging mechanisms though, TI Georgia has so
far been the only one to check tenders against a set of metrics designed to
assess the risk of corruption. (More on that in a later post.)

[image: TI Georgia]<http://sunlightfoundation.com/media/2013/09/TI-Georgia.png>
So What's Next?

It is worth keeping in mind that procurement transparency is only the
beginning<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/08/12/case-study-public-procurement-in-the-slovak-republic/>.
Various forms of corruption that occur in different stages of the procuring
process such as bribery, favoritism, collusion or custom-tailored bidding
cannot be cured by increased transparency. However, we see procurement
openness as a necessary first step in revealing some of those corrupt
mechanisms, improving access to the legal loopholes and thus enabling
reform and also providing the missing linkage between other, politically
relevant datasets.

Therefore, besides trying to map the landscape in African and Asian
countries and asking for your contribution to our ongoing research (the
questionnaire<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1naM_f6_fDSMpgueRutOV886G0zqY0K3riV7XxfVUjSw/viewform>
is
still open and waiting for your input), we have started to work more
closely with national and regional advocates and implement Sunlight's
guidelines in other countries. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be
sharing our advocacy efforts as well as introduce some case studies, best
practices and online tools from around the world. Stay tuned!

In the meanwhile, if you want to improve your country’s procurement system
and feel that Sunlight could help you, get in touch with us through
international at sunlightfoundation.com.

-- 
Júlia Keserű
International Program Coordinator

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
(1) 202-742-1520 *280

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