Contracts, Data and Investigations: COVID-19 –– 2020-04-16 edition
This is the first edition of our new newsletter that will gather and share stories covering the use and abuse of government contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subscribe now to receive this newsletter regularly. And please send us your stories and content. We’d love to hear about it.
This week: Building and using public databases of government emergency spending, investigating fraud in COVID-19 emergency contracts, understanding the companies supplying antiviral screenings.
The lack of high-quality open data on public contracts in many countries has journalists building their own databases listing public contracts and tagging COVID-19 related deals. Argentina’s La Nación journalists Bianca Pallaro and Ivan Ruiz painstakingly built an impressive list of 3000 contracts used in emergency procedures and identified overpriced food purchases. Check out some of the public procurement registers from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the European Union, Paraguay, and Ukraine that are marking coronavirus contracts for easy searching and analysis.
Doing thorough background checks for suppliers is difficult when contracts are awarded under emergency procedures. It’s all too easy for fraudsters to game the system. Journalists have uncovered some of these deals. In the US, FEMA awarded a contract to a bankrupt company for more than $55 million. Germany nearly lost $15 million to a scheme using a cloned company in the Netherlands. In Paraguay, Juan Carlos Flecha of ABC Color identified “golden” masks and ties to bribery networks by analyzing emergency contracts in the official public contracting register.
Little is known about the companies developing the critical antiviral screenings needed to respond to the crisis. Peruvian data journalism team Ojo Público investigated biotech companies behind molecular or serological kits to detect the disease and created a database of the 110 firms.
The investigative journalism network OCCRP and its partners have been busy prying into crime and corruption amid the outbreak. Organized crime is profiteering from the pandemic as stories from Romania and Slovenia reveal. The Hill also wrote about the coming corruption pandemic, while in Foreign Policy, Tammy Kupperman Thorp called for more vigilance and adopting safeguards in emergency relief programs.
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"We're seeing a de facto break down of all agreements that took 50 years to write.
Now it's whoever has most cash in the suitcase."
Gian Luigi Albano, Head of Research and Strategies,
CONSIP, the National Central Purchasing Body of Italy.
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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 to share? Write to us at media@open-contracting.org. Thanks for reading. Did a friend forward you this email? Click here to subscribe.