NEW PLATFORM ENABLES AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION OF QUESTIONABLE PUBLIC PROCUREMENTS

Widespread abuse and corruption have continuously plagued public procurement in Kosovo, with civil society and government oversight officials struggling to find solutions.  This began to change when the Government of Kosovo introduced a series of extraordinary reforms in cooperation with USAID’s Transparent, Effective and Accountable Municipalities activity.  The availability of public procurement data, including contracts, in an online national electronic procurement system has led to breakthrough changes in transparency and made contracting authorities more accountable to citizens. 

The President of the Public Procurement Regulatory Commission, the central government agency that supervises public procurement, stated, “Today, we offer tools and systems that ensure public money is spent well and investigators can track them easily.  We went beyond with transparency measures, making Kosovo a regional pioneer, setting standards in this regard.”  Kosovo is the only country in the region to have introduced an Application Programming Interface (API) into their national procurement system to meet open contracting data standards.

The ability of other software to link to Kosovo’s national procurement system through an API has provided the opportunity for watchdog organizations to introduce new user-friendly formats, such as the well-established Open Procurement Transparency Portal, developed by the NGO Fol (“to speak” in Albanian) in cooperation with USAID.  Building on this success, another Kosovo NGO, Democracy Plus, has recently developed the Red Flag Platform, which is incorporated into the transparency portal.  The new platform uses formulas and algorithms to filter procurement contracts through nine red-flag indicators and mark the ones that seem questionable or prone to corruption.  Journalists are already using the new Red Flag Platform to identify possible cases of corruption.