Integrity Watch Red Flags: a new tool to monitor EU public procurement

Each year in the EU, over 250,000 public autho­ri­ties spend roughly 2 trillion euros buying goods and servi­ces for public projects. From scho­ols and hospi­tals to power plants and dams, this means big budgets and complex plans, provi­ding oppor­tu­ni­ties for misma­na­ge­ment and proce­du­ral irre­gu­la­ri­ties that can poten­ti­ally lead to instan­ces of fraud and even corrup­tion.   

Contracts to suppli­ers can be awar­ded without fair compe­ti­tion. This allows compa­nies with poli­ti­cal connec­ti­ons to triumph over their rivals, or compa­nies within the same industry can rig their bids, incre­a­sing the cost of goods and servi­ces. It esti­ma­ted that fraud can add as much as 50 per cent to a project’s costs. But corrup­tion in public procu­re­ment is not merely a finan­cial matter. It also redu­ces the quality of public servi­ces, distor­ting markets and deter­ring future invest­ments. At a time when trust in public admi­nis­tra­tion and insti­tu­ti­ons is fragile at best, it is vital to provide citi­zens, jour­na­lists and civil soci­ety and nati­o­nal enfor­ce­ment autho­ri­ties with the means to moni­tor of public procu­re­ment in the EU.  

This is why Trans­pa­rency Inter­na­ti­o­nal (TI) has deve­lo­ped Inte­grity Watch Red Flags: a real-time public procu­re­ment moni­to­ring tool that flags EU tende­ring proce­du­res for poten­tial risks of fraud and corrup­tion. Our new plat­form is desig­ned to help navi­gate the hundreds of thou­sands of procu­re­ment docu­ments publis­hed on the EU’s e-procu­re­ment portal since 2020. Key featu­res of the new plat­form are:  

• Nearly 40,000 contracts and contract awards funded by the EU’s budget in all EU Member States.  
• Over 320,000 contracts and contract award noti­ces funded by nati­o­nal budgets in Bulga­ria, Greece, Italy, Lithu­a­nia, Latvia, Poland, Portu­gal, Roma­nia and Slove­nia.  

• Fully inter­ac­tive maps, graphs and charts that allow users to filter the data by country, regi­on*, econo­mic sector, autho­rity type, contract type and red flag risk indi­ca­tor.  
• Data is upda­ted in near-real time every day at midnight.  
• 20 Risk indi­ca­tors based on a metho­do­logy origi­nally deve­lo­ped by our part­ners Trans­pa­rency Inter­na­ti­o­nal Hungary, K-Moni­tor and Petabyte.  

The tool has been deve­lo­ped within the frame­work of the Inte­grity Pacts project, which seeks to incre­ase trans­pa­rency and accoun­ta­bi­lity of public procu­re­ment by promo­ting civic moni­to­ring mecha­nisms in tende­ring proce­du­res. As the EU embarks on its single largest funding programme, Inte­grity Watch Red flags aims to help all those invol­ved in safe­guar­ding public funds by helping to iden­tify which econo­mic sector(s), contrac­ting autho­ri­ties, funding program­mes and tende­ring proce­du­res are poten­ti­ally at risk. The objec­tive being to promote good gover­nance and support a sustai­na­ble reco­very for milli­ons of citi­zens across the EU.  

^{*regi­o­nal level maps are not avai­la­ble in Lithu­a­nia and Latvia.}