Contracts, Data and Investigations - Edition 76

In this newsletter, we cover stories about the use and abuse of public contracts and provide 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. 

[What we’re keeping an eye on]

Who runs the companies? Central Asian experts say the president of Kyrgyzstan has been making constitutional changes and rewriting laws to give his office greater authority. Now, construction contracts for state projects can be handed out to private companies with little to no oversight. An investigation by OCCRP, together with Temirov Live and Kloop, identified 11 major state projects under the executive’s direct control, including a new “presidential palace,” an airport, and social housing, and five businesses that appear to be implementing them. Read the full story by Eldiyar Arykbaev, Bolot Temirov and Kloop.

Open contracting reporting: Nigeria’s International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) trained 20 journalists as part of their Open Contracting Reporting Fellowship. Work has resumed on an abandoned road project following reports sponsored by this program. Here’s the original investigation by Adeyemi Adekunle. 

Collusion: Authorities are investigating potential fraud in €2.5 billion worth of EU pandemic recovery contracts that were awarded to just 10 companies in Greece, Politico’s Nektaria Stamouli reports. The firms allegedly colluded to avoid more than one of them competing for the same tender ― restricting the number of companies who benefited and potentially driving up fees. Here’s more about our work on transparency in the EU’s recovery spending. 

Air giant grounded: Embattled aerospace manufacturer Boeing is lobbying to secure lucrative contracts in Canada after the government announced its US$8 billion defense plan, reveals an investigation (paywall, short summary on X) by the Investigative Journalism Foundation’s Carly Penrose. Check out the organization’s databases here.

Find the loophole: When Hawaii passed a law that barred government contractors from giving money to politicians, legislators wrote in a loophole that effectively gutted it. The ban would apply only to donations from the actual corporate entities that got contracts – but not to their owners, employees or any related businesses. For The New York Times and Civil Beat, Blaze Lovell, Eric Sagara and Irene Casado Sanchez reviewed hundreds of thousands of campaign records and linked more than 28,000 of the donations to contractors. Meanwhile, Hawaii still hasn’t replaced its 50-year-old financial system despite spending $8 million on the project.

Many a mickle makes a muckle: A recent audit of Zambia’s debt identified wasteful spending and inflated costs such as overpriced laptops for schools without electricity, report Bloomberg’s Matthew Hill and Taonga Mitimingi.  

[Data insights]

Inefficient correctional contracts: Only 40% of Ecuador’s annual procurement budget for prison services was executed in 2023, according to the news outlet Primicias citing an analysis by Fundación Ciudadanía y Desarrollo and the Public Contracting Observatory. Questions were also raised about $27 million in prison food contracts awarded directly to a single supplier. Access the data here.

New open contracting data: After a long build up, Guatemala has started publishing standardized open contracting data. You can access the data on the government portal or via our Data Registry. Civil society organization Red Ciudadana has a brief introduction on how to use the data. And Ojo con mi Pisto’s step-by-step guide can help you keep track of local infrastructure projects (in Spanish).  

Managing the flow of water … and money: In the fascinating investigation for Factcheck, Jamilya Maricheva investigates investments across Kazakhstan to manage water shortages, using data from the Ministry of Water Resources and data on public spending and contracts. 

US Federal Infrastructure Investment: The Brookings Institute has a new hub to track all state and local investments and awards, including an interactive dashboard and notices of funding opportunities. The complete award data is also available as download (XLS).

Pandemic contract repository: Civic tech organization Civio in Spain provides easy access to all contracts under emergency procedures. Download as CSV. 

[Tips from practitioners]

Data visualization from Two Points Make A Line by Kenneth Reyes 

Kenneth Reyes discovered his love for data visualization while working as a research analyst. He started the blog Two Points Make A Line in his spare time, as a way to teach himself more advanced skills like JavaScript. When it came to deciding what content to feature, he would often search for datasets on sites like Kaggle. But what he was really after was "something that was important but not well publicized," he says. 

A friend who was a cyclist told him about a paper published by WeSolve Foundation, a non-profit that advocated for protected bike lanes in the Philippines and tracked the implementation of these tax-funded projects, as part of a coalition of 140 civic groups. WeSolve's dataset on the bike lane contracts was open "and pretty clean," says Reyes, so he thought it was the perfect topic for a blog post. 

Reyes re-used the existing WeSolve data to create interactive maps of the cycling routes, manually searching for additional details in the contracting documents themselves and filling in the gaps with his knowledge of Metro Manila. In other visualizations, he explored the relationships between the contracts and bidders with node maps, and used compound bar charts to show the items purchased (spoiler: a lot of paint!).

"I'm really grateful that [WeSolve] left their dataset out there publicly, because it really encouraged other people to analyze it and make something with it, so that the data they gathered has a second life out of the paper they wrote."
Kenneth Reyes

His advice for others interested in exploring data for similar government projects is that public audiences generally respond well to interactive maps, especially when examining a topic like procurement for infrastructure that can be geolocated. (Governments can help by including the exact coordinates and/or routes in their contracts too). He adds: "Start a blog. It helps motivate you and disseminates information pretty quick."  

Reyes describes his methodology in detail in his original post. Learn more about WeSolve's bike lane monitoring and how frontline pandemic responders inspired their coalition.

[Data tools & resources]

Calculating red flags: Meet Cardinal, our new open-source library of risk indicators to detect and deter corruption in public procurement. We developed it in collaboration with governments and civil society organizations and the support of the Microsoft ACTS program. Heads-up: it does require some technical knowledge. But give it a run and ping us if you have any questions. We’d love to hear how you are using it. 

If you’re interested in investigating data from the Dominican Republic, submit your research proposal to us by 5 July. 

From floods to climate resilience: I will join the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer Conference in London, 3-4 July to share insights on the role of public spending and public contracts in climate investigations. I’m looking forward to the conversations and questions, and hope you’ll stay tuned for the next edition with all of my insights. 

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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?