Contracts, Data and Investigations – Edition 2021-12-17
Christmas rush on contracts, UK procurement refresh, new data from Chile and Ecuador
This newsletter gathers stories covering the use and abuse of government contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Share your stories and investigations with us. We’d love to read and feature them. And we’d love a like if you enjoyed the read.
It's the high season for last-minute contracts. Spend Network has named the UK’s “grinches of public procurement,” identifying buyers with the most contracts announced and closed over the holidays. The Ministry of Defence leads the pack. In total, there were 758 Christmas deadlines this year, a sobering climb of 82% more than 2020. If you’re looking for story leads, check out which contracts might be flying under the radar in your country.
In better news from the UK, the government has published a response to the more than 600 comments on its Green Paper on Transforming Procurement. A clear majority (77%) of stakeholders supported the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard to bring in a single integrating platform to share user-friendly information. Read our quick take, as we have all seen how the UK’s antiquated and fragmented approach to procurement has struggled amid the pandemic (and even before it).
Ecuador’s public procurement agency has launched a new platform providing open data and full access to its public contracts, a total of 127,163 contracts with nearly 15,000 suppliers valued at $3.5bn in 2021 only. An API and downloads are available as OCDS JSON, CSV and XLS.
The features of Chile’s open data platform are expanding as well. A new tool allows users to compare different public contracting buyers, get insights into overall contracting values and methods, and see which businesses profit from the deals.
To close the year, we’ll leave you with a story from Uttar Pradesh, India, where a politician accidentally discovered a new method for checking the quality of road construction projects. A coconut cracked a freshly built street, after a local official threw the fruit during the inauguration of the $200k public work. The coconut stayed intact, the contractor’s reputation did not.
We hope you enjoyed this year’s 26 newsletters packed with some of your best investigations. After a short break, we’ll be back with some new ideas for this publication, more incisive stories and new insights on how to use the contracting data available globally. Stay tuned!
For our recommendations, resources and tools, check our COVID-19 resource page. This newsletter has been put together by the Open Contracting Partnership. Comments? Suggestions? Got a story you’ve written to share? Write to Sophie and Georg at gneumann@open-contracting.org. Thanks for reading.
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