Monithon Europe had the privilege of being represented by its president Luigi Reggi at the recent G20 Anticorruption Working Group event “Just and Sustainable Procurement for People and Planet” held in Paris, France. This gathering saw key discussions on the role of public procurement and the monitoring of public spending through open data and digital technologies. These topics are central to the G20’s agenda leading up to the summit in Brazil in November 2024, where global commitments, including the recent resolution on digitization, data, and ICTs in procurement, will be finalized.

The event featured prominent panelists such as Sally Guyer and Kristen Robinson from the Open Contracting Partnership, Giuseppe Busia, president of ANAC [here his speech and presentation], and Mr. Henrique de Oliveira Andrade, Chief of Staff of the Secretariat of Internal Control, Office of the Comptroller General, Brazil. Their collective insights underscored the significance of transparency and technological advancements in fighting corruption.

G20 (Brasil presidency) Anti-corruption working group meeting

The G20, as the primary platform for global economic cooperation, has played a crucial role in leading the global fight against corruption. G20 countries, accounting for 75% of world trade and 80% of global GDP, committed to ensure they have in place “systems of procurement based on transparency, competition and objective criteria in decision-making to prevent corruption” in 2014. They also approved G20 Principles for Promoting Integrity in Public Procurement in 2015 and a G20 Compendium of Good Practices for Promoting Integrity and Transparency in Infrastructure Development in 2019, emphasizing the need for openness and transparency of such procurement. The States parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption also committed, in 2021, to “increasing transparency and accountability in the management of public finances and in government procurement, funding and contracting services to ensure transparency in government actions in the use of public funds and during the whole public procurement cycle” to fully implement article 9 of the Convention and approved a resolution entitled Promoting transparency and integrity in public procurement in support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development last December.

Monithon introduced its latest initiative, the iMonitor project coordinated by the Government Transparency Institute, as a key example of leveraging technology to combat corruption and fraud in public procurement. The project combines data-driven risk assessments with civic monitoring of public contracts, empowering local communities to evaluate the outcomes of public tenders and report actionable findings to law enforcement agencies. This approach highlights the potential of digital tools to enhance the capabilities of citizens in ensuring accountability and transparency in public spending.

Monithon, created in 2013 as an independent initiative supporting citizens in the participatory assessment of the effectiveness of EU projects, has, since 2023, offered a specific methodology and a tool for gathering input on potential misuse of public funding to anyone. The input from local communities is primarily used to foster collaboration with local authorities responsible for local investments, but it can also be forwarded, if deemed relevant, to national anticorruption authorities.

Citizens can select relevant public tenders to monitor on the OpenTender portal, which gathers open government data on millions of contracts in the EU from different official sources and calculates corruption risk indicators for each tender. In Italy, citizens can also start the selection process by identifying an EU-funded project in their town or neighborhood through the Project Finder map, where projects are georeferenced with high precision based on the address. Once they find an interesting project for their community, they can look for related public tenders through the Unique Project Code, which all Italian public administrations use.

The panel discussion indeed highlighted the importance of including civic actors in the procurement process, by “giving stakeholders clear channels to turn insights from open data on public procurement into policy changes, better resource allocation, stronger contract negotiation and smarter more efficient delivery of goods, services and infrastructure”. For this to happen, citizens should be able to access sufficient training on technical matters.  The discussion also focused on the crucial availability of high-quality and interoperable data, such as those connecting investment projects, public tenders, business registers, company ownership, and beneficial ownership. The AI application ALICE presented by the Brazilian government seems a very promising tool when based on the right data.

We extend our gratitude to the delegates of the G20 countries for their engaging questions and to the French government team for their excellent organization of the event. The outcomes of this session will be shared with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to support the implementation of CoSP resolution 10/9.

For more information about the iMonitor project, visit the iMonitor website.