Red Flag for Integrity: Giving The Green Light to Open Data Solution

One of the four primary use cases for open contracting is promoting integrity. Public contracting and procurement is government’s single greatest corruption risk, a fact highlighted by the OECD, the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, and the European Commission. Some 57% of foreign bribery cases prosecuted under the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention involved bribes to obtain public contracts.

One of the exciting promises of real-time data and analytics in public procurement is that corruption and fraud can potentially be detected and prevented before they occur, rather than leaving government to pick up the pieces afterwards. Similarly, potentially anomalous patterns of bidding or contract allocation can be scrutinised directly to check for potential problems as they occur, supporting innovative, data-driven policy solutions to reinforce the most promising practices in integrity and fairness. An additional value of open data is that it allows different actors to check the integrity of the system at different times from their own unique user perspective, enabling a more robust analysis and potentially preventing a single point of failure.