Data Quality Barriers for Transparency in Public Procurement

Governments need to be accountable and transparent for their public spending decisions in order to prevent losses through fraud and corruption as well as to build healthy and sustainable economies. Open data act as a major instrument in this respect by enabling public administrations, service providers, data journalists, transparency activists, and regular citizens to identify fraud or uncompetitive markets through connecting related, heterogeneous, and originally unconnected data sources. To this end, in this article, we present our experience in the case of Slovenia, where we successfully applied a number of anomaly detection techniques over a set of open disparate data sets integrated into a Knowledge Graph, including procurement, company, and spending data, through a linked data-based platform called TheyBuyForYou. We then report a set of guidelines for publishing high quality procurement data for better procurement analytics, since our experience has shown us that there are significant shortcomings in the quality of data being published. This article contributes to enhanced policy making by guiding public administrations at local, regional, and national levels on how to improve the way they publish and use procurement-related data; developing technologies and solutions that buyers in the public and private sectors can use and adapt to become more transparent, make markets more competitive, and reduce waste and fraud; and providing a Knowledge Graph, which is a data resource that is designed to facilitate integration across multiple data silos by showing how it adds context and domain knowledge to machine-learning-based procurement analytics.publishedVersio

Corruption manual for beginners: "Corruption techniques" in public procurement with examples from Hungary

This paper develops 30 novel quantitative indicators of grand corruption that operationalize 20 distinct techniques of corruption in the context of public procurement. Each indicator rests on a thorough qualitative understanding of rent extraction from public contracts by corrupt networks as evidenced by academic literature, interviews and media content analysis. Feasibility and usefulness of the proposed indicators are demonstrated using micro-level public procurement data from Hungary in 2009-2012. While the prime value of this broad set of indicators is the possibility of combining them into a robust composite indicator of high-level corruption, the high degree of detail also reveals that many regulatory interventions have succeeded in changing the form of corruption, but not its overall incidence

Following the Money 2011: How the 50 States Rate in Providing Online Access to Government Spending Data

Grades states' progress in launching or enhancing transparency 2.0 Web sites that provide comprehensive, one-stop access to searchable and downloadable databases of government spending. Outlines benefits such as savings, challenges, and recommendations

Organic Food for Youth in Public Settings: Potentials and Challenges. Preliminary Recommendations from a European Study

This report contains presentations from the four explorative work packages in iPOPY. The iPOPY project – innovative Public Organic food Procurement for Youth – is one of eight transnational research programs initiated by the 11 European countries participating in the CORE Organic I funding body network. iPOPY aims at increasing the consumption of organic food among young people, especially in school meal settings but also elsewhere, e.g. at music festivals. We work towards this goal by studying how organic food as well as the organic concept in general has been introduced in public food serving settings in various countries, and what may be the most promising approaches. Italy, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Germany are the countries being studied. The iPOPY work packages explore policy issues, supply chain organization and the impact of certification, the users’ perceptions and participation in the food system, and the health impacts of organic food implementation. By June 2010, iPOPY will be completed. Hence, this report is linked to the last iPOPY seminar arranged during the BioFach Trade Fair in Nuremberg, Germany. We arranged similar seminars also in 2008 and 2009. These seminars presented the situation with respect to organic school meals in many different European countries (2008) and in more detail in iPOPY countries as well as some relevant cases (2009). Proceedings are available from the 2009 seminar (Nölting et al 2009), and all presentations from the 2008 seminar are found on the iPOPY website, www.ipopy.coreportal.org. In the seminar in 2010, we will draw a link from iPOPY results to the municipality of Nuremberg, which has ambitious aims as to becoming an Organic Model City (BioModellstadt). This includes far reaching goals for the share of organic and regional food served in public schools and kindergartens. Further, the project results will be linked to the general situation for school meals in Europe. For this presentation, no written paper is available, but we will present the slides on the website. From the project we present preliminary recommendations and conclusions from the four explorative work packages

Exploring anti-corruption capabilities of e-procurement in construction project delivery in Nigeria

The use of electronic (e-­) procurement to support the execution of supply chain management activities in the different industrial sectors is permeating all regions of the world. However, in countries in sub-Saharan Africa where there is a significant level of corruption and unethical practices in the procurement process, there is a need for a better understanding of how e-Procurement can help to check the incidence of corrupt and unethical practices in construction project delivery. This study relied on a cross-sectional survey of 759 respondents, including architects, builders, engineers, estate/facilities managers, contractors, construction/project managers, quantity surveyors, supply chain managers and others to identify and analyse the anti-corruption capabilities of e-Procurement in construction project delivery in Nigeria. The results of the descriptive statistics, relative importance index and principal components analysis identified 18 anti-corruption capabilities in e-Procurement in construction project delivery with the three most important ones being the capability of e-Procurement to ensure good inventory management/record keeping; accountability by providing audit services trail and minimise direct human contacts during bidding. The key underlying dimensions of these capabilities include the advantage of e-Procurement over the traditional paper-based method; transparent bidding process and increase in competition in construction project delivery process. The findings of this study have implications, especially, on the use of e-Procurement to curb corruption in construction procurement activities

Providing organic school food for youths in Europe - Policy strategies, certification and supply chain management in Denmark, Finland, Italy and Norway

In the proceedings of an iPOPY seminar, some results of the research project were presented. First of all, Anne-Kristin Løes and Benjamin Nölting give an overview of the iPOPY project and its first results. This outline of the holistic research approach helps locate the challenges of the supply side of POPY, some crucial aspects of which are analyzed in the following papers. Political strategies are highly relevant for changing the “politicized market” of public food procurement. Thorkild Nielsen, Niels Heine Kristensen and Bent Egbert Mikkelsen reflect on whether and how organic food in schools and kindergartens can be described as a part of an ecological modernization strategy in Denmark. They discuss how it has merged with more economically and technically approach in public catering policy. Organic production has to be certified and labeled along the supply chain in order to maintain trust in organic premium products. Since January 1st 2009, organic certification in Europe is subject to the new Council Regulation (EC) No 834/2007 of 28 June 2007. This regulation specifically excludes so-called mass catering operations. It is up to EU member states to apply national rules or private standards insofar as these comply with community law. The paper of Carola Strassner presents the state of the art and upcoming changes of organic certification of out-of-home catering in Germany with regard to Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Italy. Finally, supply chains of organic school food have to be organised in a sustainable way in order to serve high quality food to pupils. Stefano Bocchi, Roberto Spigarolo, Marco Valerio Sarti, and Benjamin Nölting present a best practice case of controlled food chains (filiera controllata) from Italy, the European champion of organic school food. From the province and the city of Piacenza in the region of Emilia-Romagna, we can learn a lot about a short and certified organic food-chain, a wide range of regional and organic products provided through a shared logistic organisation among local partners, and specific tender procedures