Why should I care about public procurement transparency?

Members of the RECORD team explain what this project is about and why it’s important for members of the public to care about transparency of public procurement.

It’s all about the taxpayers’ money

Kryzsztof Izdebski from ePánstwo Foundation, Poland

Krzysztof is an anti-corruption activist from Poland and he explains the importance of the work that will be done under the RECORD project to open up public procurement.

I love the fact that this is all about taxpayers’ money, which should be spent in a transparent and accountability way. So the public procurement environment should secure that information on public spending is available to those who pay taxes.

I like finding patterns in the data

Elena Calistru from Funky Citizens, Romania

Elena is an anti-corruption activist from Romania, and she tells us how under this project the use of data will help uncover corruption.

With the RECORD project, we will be collecting a huge amount of information data and we will be helping putting it in order so that others – such as investigative journalists can find corruption or fraud.

We are using cutting-edge technologies

Daniel Macyszyn from ePánstwo Foundation, Poland

Daniel uses new technologies to advance and protect democracy, and he explains how that will be done during the RECORD project.

What’s really interesting for me in this project is the ability to use high technology – of the kind used by financial institutions – to track abnormalities in the public procurement market.

Procurement is where most corruption happens

Eva Belmonte from Civio, Spain

Madrid-based investigative journalist Eva Belmonte explains why journalists should investigate public procurement.

Most corruption cases that you have heard about have involved public procurement, so as a journalist, you need to understand it and to investigate it.

This is about a huge percentage of public budgets

Sandor Lederer from K-Monitor, Hungary

An anti-corruption activist from Hungary, Sandor tells us why the RECORD project is important.

A huge chunk of public budgets are spent through public procurement and as anti-corruption activists, we can make these types of public spending more transparent and more easily accessible to citizens, so that eventually they can have a say in how money is spent, so that taxpayers’ money can be saved and spent more efficiently.