Contracts, Data and Investigations - Edition 75
This month: Data-driven procurement in Latin America, applying customized GPTs in investigations, data insights from Europe, Mexico and Peru
Welcome back to our newsletter, covering stories about the use and abuse of public contracts and providing tips and insights on how to investigate public procurement. Are you investigating a public contract right now? Get in touch – we’d love to help.
Last month, we launched our new strategy focused on delivering better public contracting for people and the planet. Stories like the ones highlighted in this newsletter play an important role in revealing the real-world impact of procurement, whether it’s explaining why a public toilet in San Francisco comes with a $1.7 million price tag or how corruption rings secured deals to supply expensive medical equipment in hospitals in Czechia.
[What we are keeping an eye on]
In Latin America, local media organizations are using data to dig deep into public contracts. For Costa Rica’s La Voz de Guanacaste, Johel Solano summarizes the irregularities and corruption in public works contracts identified through the red flagging system GuanaData. In Colombia, Consonante’s Natalia Prieto Caballero investigates a monopoly running school transport services.
IT procurement can be a mess. Just ask Canada’s auditor general, who released a scathing report about mismanagement in developing ArriveCAN – a declaration app for travelers entering Canada. The problems with the project started with the price: originally budgeted at C$80,000, the actual cost of ArriveCAN couldn’t be determined due to poor documentation but was estimated at over C$50 million. Montreal academic Annie Lecompte gives an insightful review of what went wrong. Researchers Sean Boots and Amanda Clarke provide recommendations for deeper reforms. This is by no means an issue solely for Canada. Under a contract estimated at £2.4 billion, Fujitsu did not fix bugs identified in the UK’s Horizon accounting system because it would have been too expensive and time-consuming, a developer for the company said. In a new report, our expert Lindsey Marchessault summarizes how to do IT procurement better.
This newsletter was started during the pandemic when it became clear that emergency rules led to, let’s say somewhat problematic purchases. Remember the Bosnian raspberry farm delivering ventilators in 2020? Now, at least the local actors involved were convicted over embezzlement. In Spain, mask deal commissions are under investigation, estimated to be at least US$1.5 million.
A “wide-spread trail of bribes”: German company SAP has settled corruption allegations in South Africa and Indonesia by paying over US$220 million. Read the Deferred Prosecution Agreement.
[Data insights]
Europe: Following last year’s report on shrinking competition in the EU, the European Court of Auditors has released a dashboard providing insights into the data behind the report, by country and by key sectors.
Nigeria: GovSpend publishes data on daily spending by Nigeria’s government from 2018 to 2023. The tool is run by the civic tech organization BudgIT.
Peru: Peru is the latest publisher of standardized open data, covering nearly 2,000 local and federal government agencies. Find out more about the publication policy and navigate the data. A quick analysis can be found via our Data Registry.
Mexico: The Mexican think tank IMCO has developed a report reviewing key indicators and data for the last six years in public contracting. It reveals some federal institutions use direct awards almost exclusively despite rules requiring competitive bidding; contract documents aren’t published for one in six procurement processes; and millions in pesos awarded to companies with little or no experience.
[Tips from practitioners]
Analyzing reports by state auditors can be a great way to find leads for stories about anomalies in public spending, but it can involve sifting through a lot of long and technical documents. This gave Filipino journalist Jaemark Tordecilla the idea of exploring whether ChatGPT and custom GPTs could be useful timesavers for such investigations.
Jaemark created a custom beat assistant for the Filipino Commission on Audit (COA) reports, sharing his observations in an article published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the Generative AI in the Newsroom project.
Some highlights:
“All told, I spent a total of about 16 hours working on customizing COA Beat Assistant, trying different sets of instructions and prompts, to finally get it to behave close to the way I wanted it to behave. Given that there are dozens of audit reports published every year and each would ordinarily take at least an hour or maybe two to comb through, this kind of upfront investment could save a lot of time in the long run.”
Testing it with his colleague, he found: “The summaries that COA Beat Assistant provides are useful at first glance, as they give an experienced journalist a good idea whether to spend more time on a particular agency or to move on to another report that might yield something more newsworthy.” His colleague, familiar with the report structures, would also be able to further customize the assistant.
Finally: “The tool isn’t without flaws. Aside from the formatting issues I had mentioned, (his colleague) found shortcomings with how the COA Beat Assistant processed documents.” And it tended to struggle with larger documents.
Journalists who’ve tested the beat assistant are using it strictly as a screening tool, not a writing tool, Jaemark notes. “It helps them uncover the leads, but they still write their reports by painstakingly going through the document themselves,” he told us. That’s good news for us humans – while the AI tool is valuable reporting aid, there’s still no substitute for a persistent investigative reporter.
[Data tools & resources]
Price-fixing cartels. Check out the Private International Cartels dataset and guidance created by economist John M. Connor. It covers 1,500+ suspected or convicted cartels between 1990–2019 and includes information about company names, individuals indicted or punished, cartel geography, industry, market share, overcharges, and penalties. (h/t Data is Plural)
Track spending on US lobbying: Following money in politics matters. When it comes to public spending and contracting, lobbying can influence which projects are prioritized, how they are designed, and potentially even which company is selected. US federal lobbying skyrocketed to over $4.2 billion in 2023, so Open Secrets has a tool for you to track where this money is going. Here’s a run-down of how it works. For the EU, you can use Transparency International EU’s Integrity Watch or LobbyFacts to research lobbyists and their meetings.
Investigative grants: The Fund for Investigative Journalism is accepting proposals for grants up to $10,000 for full investigative stories and seed grants for early reporting up to $2,500. Proposals are due on 29 April and for seed grants on 10 May.
***
This newsletter has been put together by the Open Contracting Partnership. Thanks for reading. Do give us a like if you’ve enjoyed the read. Did a friend forward you this email?