Why Public Procurement

Understanding public procurement is complicated, but not impossible. Rules regulating it are probably among the most complex in each country. Critical information is often not published and, when it is, the formats and structure make it hard to work with. Let's be honest: working with government procurement is much more difficult than taking a statement from a politician and putting it in a headline. But, despite that, or maybe precisely because of it, it’s one of the most useful skills for a journalist. Trust us.

WHAT, PROCUREMENT?! 

Every beat has a public procurement angle. Every one. You can investigate corruption in public works, access to health and medicines, or fire fighting services. Whatever your specialisation as a journalist, whatever your field, understanding the legal framework and data sources related to public contracts will enable you to find relevant headlines and analyse how public bodies spend their budgets. And the money involved is huge: according to the European Commission , public authorities in the EU 1 spend around 14% of GDP on the purchase of services, works and supplies. That adds up to around €2 trillion per year. And a lot of those purchases impact citizens directly, at schools, hospitals or through the transportation infrastructure. Bad management is a big story, one with a clear impact. And while monitoring procurement is important during normal times, it’s even more so during an emergency, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many stories can be investigated, e.g. what are the companies winning tenders for essential supplies, and at which price? Are the public bodies managing to buy what they need? Are bidders abusing their market positions and colluding? Or, as we move pass the first emergency reactions and look at potential cures, who’s supplying vaccines and treatments?

Procurement processes are heavily regulated, with lengthy procedures and important amounts of bureaucracy. The applicable laws are complex and full of exceptions and edge cases, depending on the type of product being purchased or the amount or the type of public body. This means journalists need specialised knowledge to navigate the maze, but the time spent in acquiring these skills is a worthy investment: knowing how to find a contract, obtain the legal paperwork and uncover the beneficiary owners of the winning bidder is a truly valuable asset, as public bodies are most often legally bound to publish data at every step of the process. Because of this, fighting your way through a procurement portal is sometimes the only way to fight against opacity. For example, to investigate the Pharma industry: governments are normally required to sign confidentiality agreements when purchasing certain drugs from Big Pharma companies, in order to maintain prices hidden from public knowledge, but details can leak through procurement documents. (Hint: check the minutes from the award meetings.) The more complicated the process, the easier it is for someone to make a mistake and leak data inadvertently. Traditional journalists don’t usually have the time and expertise to gather, understand and analyse a procurement dataset. But, as an investigative one, investing time in studying it will afford you a unique point of view, and plenty of exclusive stories. It’s a big place, there’s space for everybody! Careful though: it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions by mistake if you don’t master the basic concepts and learn about the legal processes in your country. You wouldn’t be alone though: even big outlets publish inaccurate stuff all too often.

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH PROCUREMENT? SOME EXAMPLES 

Big or small, every purchase done by a public body goes through a procurement process and leaves a trace. So you can potentially look at any area. You can compare purchases across public bodies. You can look at the trends at a particular one. You can track a particular bidder, which may be linked to a politically sensitive person. It may be useful to look at two different groups of stories, based on the number of tenders involved. On one extreme, we can find stories based on a single contract. Civio, a Spanish non-profit newsroom focusing on watchdog and data journalism, monitors the Spanish Official Gazette every day, looking at items such as appointments and new regulations… and contracts. When a regional government in Spain published details about a new institutional advertising campaign, Civio looked at the contract details, and showed that the campaign contents included not just neutral public service information, but also partisan messages to improve the government image, which goes against the law. Once denounced, the contract was canceled and the campaign was modified. Knowing how to find an individual contract is also valuable for fact-checking: after a government official stated in Congress that private security companies were not being used to protect public buildings, Civio managed to find a contract that said otherwise. And the best thing is: once you understand the procurement law with confidence, you can write a headline denouncing a contract as “illegal” without fearing a letter from lawyers.

On the other extreme, you can combine your knowledge about public procurement with data journalism skills, and produce thorough long-form investigations that look at thousands -or tens of thousands!- of contracts across years and public bodies. For example, Civio analysed how Spanish public bodies were splitting medium-sized tenders into several small ones, in order to avoid competition and transparency legal requirements. Overconfident public bodies did this with no shame, awarding several small contracts to the same company the same day, for amounts one cent below the legal threshold.

Even better: once the threshold was modified in early 2018, as part of new regulations, contract renewals magically reduced their prices to fit just below the new limit: in early 2018, good and services contracts clustered just below 18,000€, the limit to be awarded directly. After March, 10% of all contracts were between 14,900 and 14999,99€. So, to conclude, understanding public procurement is tough. And developing a broad investigation with thousands of contracts is even harder, at every step: accessing the data, cleaning it, finding a story, and visualising it so an average reader finds it attractive. But the result is a unique story, worthy of the effort. So, yes, it's a difficult subject, but an extremely useful one for a journalist. And we're here to help you get up to speed.

Author: Eva Belmonte, Madrid-based investigative journalist (Civio, Spain)