[OpenSpending] Announcing a New Procurement Initiative by the Sunlight Foundation

Tue Mar 12 07:57:08 UTC 2013

Hi Julia,

Thanks for sharing this. It is great to see that you'll be pushing for more
transparency in procurement. A few thoughts below on why I think
procurement data are interesting from a spending point of view:

Procurement data are legal docs: Most procurement data is generated as part
of a legal/contractual process, rather than budgetary. In practice this
often means that spending data and procurement data will be located in
different, not linked databases, which makes matching ect. difficult.

Procurement data holds valuable [string] details: One of the challenges
with transactional data is that it often comes with very few descriptions
on WHAT was actually purchased. Therefore, could we get better procurement
data and match this to transactional spending data, we'd know a lot more.

Procurement data + spending data = "How much did you go over budget?"
Another issue with transactional spending data is that we often have a hard
time locating what was initially budgeted for the particular project.
Matching to procurement data could help with that.

Procurement data is often released in countries where we do not have any
spending data: Best example might be within the EU, where all public
authorities (including publicly owned companies) need to public all
contracts above 200k (http://ted.europa.eu/TED/misc/chooseLanguage.do).
Most countries and cities do not provide transactional spending data yet.

I be interested to know if any of you have thoughts on this?

Best,
Anders

On 11 March 2013 20:45, Julia Keserű <jkeseru at sunlightfoundation.com> wrote:

> (Sorry for cross-posting.)
>
> FYI:
> http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/03/11/announcing-a-new-procurement-initiative/
>
> If anyone is aware of great tools and projects on procurements and
> government contracts, please let us know!
>
> Julia
>
> Announcing a New Procurement Initiative<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/03/11/announcing-a-new-procurement-initiative/>
> by Kaitlin Devine <http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/kdevine/>March
> 11, 2013, 12:19 p.m.
>
> [image: government]<http://sunlightfoundation.com/media/2013/03/stamp.jpg>Today
> we're excited to announce an expansion of our work in the area of
> government procurement. Sunlight has covered procurement before in the
> broader context ofspending transparency<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/tag/data-act/>
> , the poor state of contracting oversight systems<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/04/19/fapiis-may-be-the-worst-government-website-weve-ever-seen/>,
> and the general inability to accurately identify contractors<http://sunlightfoundation.com/sixdegrees/>,
> but since it affects many different aspects of our work, we want to address
> it more holistically.
>
> There are a few angles to pursue this from that are right up Sunlight's
> alley and lots of good questions for us to dig into. Our natural
> inclination is to look for ways that more transparency in the contracting
> process could reduce corruption, improve government effectiveness, and
> allow for more accountability to citizens. It's not just that our
> procurement process is sometimes opaque. The constellation of systems that
> exist across the government to solicit, manage, oversee, and publish
> procurement data is so disparate and confusing that it can not only
> alienate qualified small businesses and vendors from the process, but even
> seasoned auditors can have trouble navigating it. Combine the inherent
> complexity of the system with a shrinking acquisition workforce that is struggling
> to keep up with its training <http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-117>and staffing
> requirements <http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-232T>, and you have a
> system that isn't working well for anyone.
>
> This leads us to ask where transparency can be introduced to alleviate
> some of these pressures. If the acquisition workforce that's responsible
> for overseeing contractor performance is overwhelmed, doesn't it make sense
> to expose more data around the bidding process so that we can help set them
> up for success? Ideally, transparency alone would deter a lot of bad
> behavior from occurring in the first place. But barring that, if bidders'
> names and company information were public, a good deal of oversight could
> be done by the public and competing bidders. Watchdogs could ask basic
> questions about a bid: "Does this company usually work in the industry area
> it's bidding on?"; "Were the losing bidders recently formed companies that
> were set up to lose?" Setting aside potential corruption in the bidding
> process, wouldn't it be nice if there were better public metrics regarding
> which types of contracts get very few or single bids? Other companies can
> identify these single-bid niche markets inside government procurement and
> add more competition, which helps the whole process function better.
>
> [image: contract]<http://sunlightfoundation.com/media/2013/03/contract.jpg>Once
> a contract is awarded, it is difficult for the public to track its
> performance. There have been one-off projects, like the IT Dashboard <http://www.itdashboard.gov/>(currently
> archived pending new numbers) that show the public whether or not a
> contract is on-budget and on-time. That project was successful, resulting
> in the cancellation or scope reduction of several over-budget and over-time
> projects that just weren't working. Unfortunately, this kind of information
> is difficult if not impossible to discern from the data on USASpending.gov.
> The full text of contracts is only available via the FOIA process, making
> it very difficult for an outsider to ascertain whether or not contract
> requirements are being met. This puts all the burden on the acquisition
> workforce to maintain information about a contractor's performance.
> According to areport by the IG Council<http://www.ignet.gov/randp/sandwgrpt092011.pdf>,
> officers responsible for suspending contractors from doing business with
> the government generally defer from taking this action until evidence comes
> to light via indictments, criminal convictions, or civil judgments. In
> reality, they could employ this process more often, as was the report's
> recommendation. While a certain amount of responsibility must remain with
> these officers, making more contract data public can help make it easier
> for citizens to understand just what their government is acquiring.
>
> These are just a handful of the questions that we're beginning to
> investigate. In addition to exploring what the federal government could do
> better, we'll also be writing about procurement systems at various levels
> of government (including internationally) and how the process differs from
> our own. There are some great tools out there that we're looking forward to
> sharing with you, but we suspect their use here may be precluded by a lack
> of data. As we delve into this we'll be writing about our work and
> soliciting feedback from our audience -- starting with this post. Is there
> something about the process you think we should address? Do you know of an
> oversight or tracking tool we should be aware of? Let us know what you
> think in the comments. We can't begin to tackle such a large and important
> topic without the help of our broader community, so I hope you'll follow
> along and participate in the discussion.
>  Tags:
>
>
>
> --
> Júlia Keserű
> International Program Coordinator
>
> 1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
> Washington, DC 20036
>
> [image: Sunlight Foundation] <http://sunlightfoundation.com/> [image:
> Sunlight Foundation on Facebook]<http://www.facebook.com/sunlightfoundation>[image:
> Sunlight Foundation on Twitter] <http://twitter.com/sunfoundation>[image:
> OpenGov on Reddit] <http://www.reddit.com/r/sunlight> [image: Sunlight
> Foundation on YouTube] <http://www.youtube.com/sunlightfoundation> <http://sunlightfoundation.com/feeds/latest/>
>
> _______________________________________________
> openspending mailing list
> openspending at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/openspending
>
>

-- 
Anders Pedersen
Community Coordinator
OpenSpending
Open Knowledge Foundation
Twitter: @anpe
Skype: anpehej
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openspending/attachments/20130312/ea96839e/attachment.html>