Students index corruption

Politicians frequently throw around the word transparency, but the work of three doctoral students has revealed that literally none of the ministry-led public tenders over the past four years met international standards, and that the majority of tenders go unaccounted for in public records.

Jana Chvalkovská, Petr Janský and Jiří Skuhrovec from Charles University unveiled their zIndex of public procurements in January. Their study revealed that 228 billion Kč, or 67 percent of the 340 billion Kč set aside for public procurements between 2006 and 2010 is unaccounted for in the government's official information database, with none of the tenders following the best-practice guidelines established by the OECD and the Regional Development Ministry. Fourteen percent of tenders, worth 48 billion Kč, had only a single bidder during that time. 

"It seems kind of weird, because we've been hearing a lot of discussion for the past few years about how the law for public procurement should be changed, but no one had the data. Now it's done, and no one knew how bad it was," Skuhrovec said.

The three young economics Ph.D. candidates worked on their project independently with no outside funding, no interns and, they said most importantly, no agenda.

"The index's strength is independence. There is no suspicion that we are influenced by other parties," Janský said. "This is a systematic comparison of public procurement data that can be used as a basis for someone's suspicious of corruption."

The main reason these alarming results have remained below the radar, the students concluded, was not because a lack of information - in fact, according to Chvalkovská, the Czech Republic supplies more information about tenders on their centralized information system for public procurement than most other European Union countries. But the way in which it is made available makes it virtually useless.

"If they publish all the data in a bundle, it's no more transparent that it is now. You would have to spend an enormous amount of time going through these huge PDF files, and this is a barrier to transparency," Chvalkovská said.

Skuhrovec echoed that sentiment.

"There are several barriers to transparency. The first is that they don't give you any data, and the second is they give you too much," he said.

Chvalkovská originally came up with the concept of researching tenders, but then realized collecting the data would be a massive trial in patience, as each tender is in an individual document.

'Cleaning' the data

That's where Skuhrovec, an IT specialist, came in. He created an application that collected the necessary data for them. But collecting the data was only the beginning. Next the team, which had by then added Janský, had to "clean" it.

"There is a huge amount of mistakes [in the tender registrations]," Chvalkovská said. "There were quite a lot that didn't fill in the registration number," and many used different abbreviations for ministry titles that made grouping the data extremely difficult.

Finally, the three had to synthesize it. What they came out with is an index based on 10 indicators that compares the awarding of public tenders between 2006 and 2010 with best-practices guidelines established by the OECD and the Regional Development Ministry.

The project has gained significant national attention.

"Our point is to highlight that something is wrong. We don't want to say one ministry is the worst. Our point is this is the set of best practices we want to see," Janský said.

In December, the team attended an anti-corruption seminar held by the government-appointed National Economic Council (NERV), where they presented some of their findings, which stoked the interest of Prime Minister Petr Nečas, who told daily Hospodářské noviny he wants to use the system.

"My plan is that the indexes will be gradually published by all central administrations," Nečas said.

Showing the public

The team's next priority is to come out with an interactive website to make the data available to and useful for the public, which in itself should allow for more transparency.

"This tells you what the authority is doing wrong and how they are unable to inform the public how much is being spent," Skuhrovec said. "Companies can't decipher the data, and so the tenders can't attract competition, so the money is not being spent efficiently."

But it won't stop there. The ministry number-crunching was just a warm-up exercise to deal with the mass of other data the trio has on public procurements for regional authorities, towns and villages.

"We still want to come up with the perfect methodology before we evaluate everything and everyone in the country," Chvalkovská said.

To tackle that challenge, the team said, will require some time, and they are currently looking to how to obtain funding to expand the project.

"Right now, we are limited by time and a lack of funds," Janský said. 

Cat Contiguglia can be reached at
ccontiguglia@praguepost.com