In an interconnected world, combating corruption in procurement requires seamless information exchange across borders while adhering to stringent data privacy laws.
This webinar will delve into the complexities of global procurement, exploring how sophisticated data analysis can enhance transparency and accountability. Our experts will discuss strategies for fostering international collaboration, overcoming legal barriers, and leveraging technology to detect and prevent corrupt practices.
Attendees will gain insights into building robust anticorruption frameworks that protect data privacy and promote ethical procurement practices.
you have to admit everyone hello good afternoon everyone sorry for the slight delay so welcome and thank you for joining us today so firstly we would like to inform you that this session will be recorded and posted on our website in the days following webinar so you may use the Q&A section to ask questions as they will be answered at the end of the session so we would first like to give a warm welcome to the session Professor slagana Taza who has joined iaka as our new Dean she is a former Committee Member of the Afghanistan International anti-corruption monitoring and evaluation committee the first president of the Macedonian anti-corruption commission and the establisher and chair of Transparency International in Macedonia in 2004 she was appointed the director of the police academy in Scopia and a member of the university St Clement oreski Bola in 2006 she became the vice president of the association of the European police colleges and in 2008 the dean of the faculty for detectives and criminalists at the European University for the Republic of Macedonia profess Professor TOA was elected the first chair of the yat Coalition in 2009 and headed Transparency International North Macedonia before joining yaka so dear Dean the floor is yours thank you it is it is a great pleasure to be here today and uh ladies and gentlemen I welcome all those who have joined this event from different parts of the world I can see people are still joining and the group is uh increasing and it is also from different time zones so it means that there’s a great interest in this webinar it’s a pleasure really to open this webinar on a global procurement breaking barriers to combat corruption through thata exchange and to be present with you all today at the AA we believe that transparency and accountability are V vital to combating corruption which can be ensured through effective data exchange this is why we look forward to hearing the opinions of the eminent panelists on the importance of the data Exchange in combating corruption in global procurement expert talks and webinars are integral parts of our programs our efforts are focused on providing practical and theoretical knowledge to professionals to equip equip them not only with knowledge but also with tools to be better prepared to the rapidly involving changings in the anti-corruption landscape particularly those related to the constant technological progress we all should Endeavor to harence various opportunities related to new technologies to fight corruption iaka delivers anti-corruption Education and Training in various formats and languages to the public and private sector Civil Society Academia media and other stakeholders and we offer learning opportunities to professionals while allowing them to enhance their knowledge at the schedule and practice that enables them to continue their professional activities while studying I strongly suggest that all of you who are interested in learning more about our programs and activities might wish to visit the Academy’s website our team will also share more information on this matter with you during the course uh of webinar of course if you so wish we will be happy to interact with you through email exchanges after the webinar is concluded today eminent Professionals in the field of of procurement and anti-corruption are with us to share their experience knowledge and strategies for fostering change and fighting corruption practices through data exchange yak’s director of academic programs is here to moderate this important event uh and I’m sure we will get an invaluable insights on using data exchange to combine corruption in procurement I wish the panel and panelists a very very success uccessful discussion and I welcome you all again to this webinar thank you thank you very much for your opening words Dean uh so the international anti-corruption academy is an international organization and institution of post-secondary Education as uh mentioned uh which conducts research and runs various Master programs so iaka has 81 parties consisting of 77 State parties and four International organizations we have nearly 6,000 alumini from over 168 countries across the world and have a strong alumini Network and our work consists of three important pillars which include education training and technical assistance and research so I will give a very short introduction to our academic programs at iaka first so we offer four Master programs which includes our Flagship program the master in anti-corruption studies which is a master’s degree which runs in both online and hybrid format which is mainly focused on the public sector secondly we have the international master in anti-corruption compliance and Collective action which is a master’s degree in online only format and F focuses more on the private sector I would also like to present the master in anti-corruption and diplomacy which has run in partnership with the United Nations Institute for training and research which is a mixture of camp cus based and online classes and lastly we have uh since 2022 the master in anti-corruption and compliance in the Spanish language this is also run in hybrid format and discusses anti-corruption and compliance so all of our programs can be attended whilst continuing a professional employment engagement and they are run with busy Professionals in mind so our Master programs are run between 18 months and 2 years and have between 90 and 120 ects credits under the internationally recognized bolognia process so they can bring eligibility for PhD as well as specialize your skill set and knowledge to prepare and to become an agent of change in the fight against corruption these courses uh provide essential aspects in the anti-corruption field in various elements through using multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods lastly I would like to mention the upcoming online training we have which is titled fighting corruption in the supply chain which is taught with our expert Professor Chris hukins who’s here with us today and we’ll be speaking on the panel so this is a four-week training from the 5th till the 31st of August this year and is running an online format so if you have any questions or queries please feel free to write them in the Q&A box chat box or by email and I will put the email in the chat box in a moment so next I would like to give the floor to Mr pan Kumar Sinha our director of academic programs he’s been the director of academic programs since 2018 and oversees the development and implementation of yak’s academic programs such as four Master programs post-graduate diplomas uh postgraduate certifications and online open training programs he’s had a career in the civil services in India spanning almost three decades dear Pan the floor is yours thank you so much Stephanie I welcome all the panelists first and all the participants from all around the world uh I will just let me take command of the yeah okay so uh we are here to discuss about corruption in procurement and why this is so important today is that public procurement represents about 13 to 20% of the GDP of different countries the globally and the expenditure involved is nearly 9.5 trillion us so if corruption happens in procurement you can imagine how much money flows out so we have different ways and first what we are going to discuss today is about role of technology and data Exchange in controlling corruption in procurement uh estimate of unodc also says that about 10 to 25% % of public contract is lost in corruption so with this bit of background on corruption in procurement let me first introduce the panelist so the first panelist is Professor Gabriela raka is a full professor of administrative law at the University of Torino in the department of management she works regularly with Italian and European institutions including the EUR European Commission on Research issues in public procurement building networks and connecting them in different projects so a warm welcome to you Gabriela raaka then we have Isabel Rosa she is the Director of Finance studies and strategy in imic the Portuguese public procurement regulator she has worked for six years for European Commission in digital procurement policy she has over 34 years of professional experience with around 26 in leadership position in several areas such as digitization digital transformation data public procurement and public governance so welcome to you as Isabel as well then we have uh Lawrence folo Lao she is a professor at University of Paris n she works regularly on global procurement issues including uh through the World Bank that African Development Bank and other leading research and development institutions a warm welcome to you as well and finally Professor Christopher yukin uh she Ser he he serves as the Lynn David research professor in government procurement law at the George Washington University law school in Washington DC he lectures and works with colleagues and students around the world in the rapidly grow uh globalizing public procurement Community indeed professor yukin also teach on a master’s program and as you heard he is also holding a one month training program in procurement so a warm welcome to you as well Chris I will slightly uh this panel discussion will be in a different more than we normally do a webinar as a moderator I will not be intervening between one pan panelist to another so I will slightly give you a bit of flow how it is going to happen and of course at the end we will have question answers so please uh put your questions in the Q&A session uh somebody if you want to put your ideas or some Impressions uh you can also use chat but we’ll prefer the questions uh if you want to be answered by the panelist to put in the Q&A session uh in the Q&A uh part of the this webinar so today’s panel basically will explore the Practical and legal implications of exchanging vendor information digitally across borders to counter corruption this is is also a focus of a book which professor raaka and Professor yukin are editing under the aices of the public contracts in legal globalization Network launched by Professor Jean Bernard Obi he’s from science Pro uh University in in Paris so Professor raaka will open today’s panel by discussing the Innovations underway in European Union to allow governments to exchange contractor information digitally Isabel Rosa will review progress in evolution from data to digital transformation which will facilitate exchanges of procurement information then Professor Lawrence F loo will then discuss an important element of the European Union legal framework under which this information will be exchanged and the disqualification of contracts under article 57 so a bit of little bit of tech technical discussion how it’s being handled and what are the provisions and and in the directives of European union and finally Professor yukin uh will place that discussion on a global context to assess the issues which governments and laws around the world must address to in order to share information effectively on contractor qualification and Corruption so with this uh I will hand over the floor to uh Gabriela raka I will request you to take the control of the slides and uh we are here to listen to you now and I will come back with more questions uh after the panel has finished the presentations so over to you uh hello thank you very much I Tred to get the control of the slides but sorry I I don’t okay so uh then we will share uh Stephanie can you take control and move the slides please yes because I don’t find the and there the three dots and there three dots but U chat people can yes if you if you do it for me sorry thank you very much okay if uh we can pass to the the presentation so thank you very much I’m very honored to be to with you today and I would like to to to share with you all these networks Works research and especially considering as we are talking of Integrity through digital um instruments and um new means of Technology uh we want to share the previous two book that we edited with Professor yukin that are fully available online in the link of the slide that you can open easily and that’s 600 pages each one on integrity and efficiency in sustainable public contract that was a research of 2014 on integrity and so we now uh give you the followup of This research the second one was on joint crossborder procurement and all the issues on crossborder procurement and now we are working on um digital procurement so the the flow of idea is from Integrity issue to Joint procurement and all the capacity building developing of aggregated procurement as uh the capacity for doing procure good procurement that is the way to fight corruption uh require high capacity so joint procurement is really important then we think that digital tool tools are really the answer either for a good professional um way of doing procurement and for integrity so this is the perspective on which we are working in nowadays and we are really trying to also clarify that there is different talking to of dematerialization that is just using the tools uh that we had in on paper on file in the PC a PDF document or something like this but we want to uh pursue the real digitalization effective digitalization eforms e procurement in the real sense that means acting with Native digital documents inside platform that permits to really simplify have a data quality of collection of data and permit to have a new experience of procur M also very easy because if we develop good platform we can have from the buyer side and also from the side of the entity of the um economic operator a very uh simple and easy experience to join the platform and to submit their offer uh and for the procuring entity to uh to choose the best one so I think this evolution is still ongoing and we have long a lot of different experiences and on under the the name of uh e procurement often there is just the materialization that is what we are seeing often that is just print sign scan and send through an email so this is not digitalization this is just a a a simple way of the materialize something so this is the perspective that we would like to share with you on this idea of using digital instrument to simplify procurement and to collect data for assuring Integrity so the next slide please yes in the in the procurement process we consider that the transformation the digital transformation require a transformation of the um complete procurement cycle so from the definition of needs to the qualification of economic operator the Val ation of tenders the award and then the execution phase so we have to take into account the digital transformation really digital transformation and not just Dem materialization from the very beginning to the end of the procurement cycle and how we can do this well from a perspective of uh our um research through the adoption of um platforms so platform that can receive in e forms that are this document that has um has to be directly included in the platform and uh con cons permit to um develop all the stages of the procurement in a digital um way and what is uh so um two points just because we it’s the time is short and we have to just to give you some idea maybe to um propose further development in this research and your participation and real question one is the qualification of economic operators uh we realize that also at European level we don’t have in place um effective tools for overcoming all the question and the problem of certificates uh one just an example uh of the Italian anti-af certificate the certificate that that declare that you are not not a mafia supplier but this is often uh completely useless so we have to overcome this and uh concentrate the attention of the um fluxes of money capitals money laundering and how the the money passes through all the uh person that participate to a a in inside the activity of the supplier and this Evolution permit to uh overcome the requirement of certification the self-certification that is still in place in Europe and and require the idea of having a digital control of the reputation of the supplier and of the um qualification of supplier either exclusion grounds and qualification grounds of the supplier and this could be shared in all legal system not only in the European one and in the National level at uh in in Europe the second point in that is that at the end of the procurement process all the invoicing and so the payment and so the last um moment in which the money is paid for the um execution of the uh control of the procurement very quickly the green pass the idea of having a kind of certificate a quer code permits to check the uh cap capacity of the supplier and the evolution of the eforms as mandatory obviously in all this uh perspective we can consider the data that we have also new technology for procurement of Works mainly for the building information modeling that permits to develop a project as a digital twin of the um of the of the work of the uh facility that we want to build of the schools of the hospital and so on and this is a a great Evolution that will be headed to the procurement process but is uh still for still to be developed and so is to be used regularly so this require a lot of capacity so I don’t I think uh we can just pass very quickly to the next slide but I will come to an end and let it for the further um discussion just one word on this is to finish we have different system to check the qualification of supplier we have the department across the barment in Europe we have the selfcleaning as a expost system while the idea of compliance system is an exante system so I think it would be interested to uh go deeper in this uh different models and try to um clarify which are the advantage is obviously of prevention and so the exante model of compliance system is absolutely required and also the risk management issues so just the the last one if you pass to the next one exclusion ground we no no please go to the other we can skip this we can also skip this and we go to um the last one where we are considering the different system yes this is on how to um clarify this aspect um the case law I I won’t say any words on this so maybe we can I can just finish this here for the moment and I’m ready to answer your question for in the further part of the discussion thank you very much you Isabel can you take control yes indeed I think I have the control on my side so thank you Gabriella and good afternoon to everybody um well my mission today is um I think a very ambitious Mission I want to talk to you a little bit of my perspective for this long trip going from data public procurement data to digital transformation um I want to tell you that although my arguments are very much related with my experience in the EU I believe that they can be applied to many other countries or many other regions so basically what I want to tell you is um uh or I want to raise your awareness for the incredible increase in terms of data that is publicly available this is the result of the increase of digitalization that is producing more data and more structur data but with this data we have a lot of new opportunities to know better about public procurement to do new things using new tools but we also have big challenges related with the data quality for example but starting with the beginning of my story um and going back to the U context uh in the slide you can see what is mandator m are currently in the EU uh coming from the legal framework We have basically four phases of the life cycle that are mandatory to be conducted electronic these four phases are the publication of the notices the access to the tended documents the submission of the proposals or the bits and also the acceptance of electronic invoices the first two e notices and E access they are mandat since April 16 his submission is already mandatory since October 2018 and invoicing is mandatory since April 2019 for the central uh Contracting authorities um uh SubCentral Contracting authorities could in some countries uh have a derogation for one year to implement this what I want to highlight here is although we have these four mandat uh phases to be conducted electronically we noticed that um countries went much further so they digitalize more than these just four phases and while I was working for the commission from 2016 until 2022 we noticed an increase of digitalization through the life cycle of around 30% for uh public procurement which is a lot by the way simultaneous with this just to have one idea of the data we have in terms of public procurement in the EU first we have two main sources the not the information that is publicly available coming from the notice and also the information that usually is not publicly available that is used by the digital uh procurement tools these could be the tendering systems or other related systems that use this data for processing uh the life cycle simultaneous with this we have also two main Dimensions we have data that we consider available at European level is the data that is published in the European official Journal p and we also have the data that is available at the national level in each member State this data can come from very different sources we have data coming from the notices from contract registers from the tendering systems and so on what I want to tell you is at the national level we have data not only above the U thresholds but also below the U thresholds and the more uh Curious fact for me is many countries have National thresholds so they are different from country to Country which means that at the national level naturally you have a more uh broader view of what is happening in public procurement and in the slide you have an example of um data that is publicly available we don’t we don’t see the slides uh which slide are you referring to now I’m referring to the slide that is about contract registers yes I see this you see it yes okay great I was worried because I see it on my screen well Murphy has to pop up all the time I don’t know why but okay um so basically uh in the screen you have a summary table of the information that is available uh uh in 26 countries 26 European countries through the contract registers contract registers are a very specific it tool for public procurement basically they are data aggregators or data collectors and they they are also used to Foster transparency in public procurement because countries use these solutions to make data publicly available procurement data naturally but the level of transparency is also decided individual by each country some of them they publish all some of them they publish part of the data they collect the important thing here is as you can see in the slide and on the left side you have different St pages of the public procurement there’s much more data than the data that is referred by the directives and one of the interesting example for me is the contract completion notice and the contract completion notice is very important for many reasons but the main reason is somehow you can follow the money because for the contract you only have a good intention of what you want to do but you really don’t know what happened with this contract with this notice what happens is we have the information about the total amount of money that was paid for each contract and also the uh date that the contract ended plus if there’s any difference between these two values and the ones that were in the contract that was signed by both parties the Contracting Authority has to justify the differences and we already have this information publicly available in eight countries it’s huge because you don’t know only what happened for the pre-award but you also have one clear view of what happened on the post award something else I want to highlight information that is publicly available is not the same as open data part of the information that you can see in this slide is available on the open data that means you cannot only see it you can also use it and this is quite important but let’s speak about digital transformation that is a sentence that everybody’s use every day about so many things what does this means in in terms of public procurement first of all digital transformation is different from digital procurement so digital transformation is using digital tools to transform or to include a deep change in public procurement this can be about for example creating a new product creating a new service changing your process or even creating a new uh business model examples in the medical area the is quite common today that you use 3D printing for producing the medical Pro Prosthetics which is something very different from the past so in the past through public procurement you were buying a um a product today you are buying a service because when you move it from a conventional medical Pro prosthetic to a service a 3D printing service it makes all the difference to start with you need an IT guide to to uh know a little bit more about the service another change that can be introduced in the process for example it happen in Finland where they are using RPA which is robotic process automation to validate the invoices so this is not done manually any longer they connect this they use this technology to connect different uh eprocurement systems and this is uh automatically done currently in in Finland another example that was some how Dimension by Gabriella you can use technology to connect ER procurement systems to the National databases so if you want to know if a supplier is um has the taxes paid is this situation is okay with Social Security with taxes with criminal records you can connect directly to these National databases many countries in the EU are doing this currently and this is changing the business model completely because the implementation of this model also transform for example the payment of these documents or certificates that were used in the past so the situation is changing deeply when you use new technologies to do public procurement in a different way and I strongly advise these to reference in the slide and these are two important studies the first one coming from the World Bank from 2021 listing 20 use cases they identified worldwide the report that was conducted by the commission I had the privileged to be part of the team that was working on this study and we have 96 cases that are covering 70 countries worldwide for me the reference and the reason why I have these two these two studies here is when you want to do something new you should speak with others that already passed through the experience especially if it is about technology that you don’t know so well especially if it is about using AI for the first time for example and in the study of the commission for example you have the information structured in their website and you can use some parameters for example to try to identify the cases that are related with the prevention or fighting corruption I was just trying to do this just before for this presentation and currently we have 13 cases using mostly AI for helping to fight or preventing corruption in public procurement but the uh cases are quite broad that you have there quite interest and the most important things is the Lessons Learned with this projects because not everything was pink or gold uh in some cases there are projects that went a little bit south or different from the initial expectation and the Contracting authorities or the public entities were honest in saying if we knew better we would have done it in a different way there’s information about uh the budget uh the time the technology that was used and I strongly advise those that have not tried to do these type of projects yet to try to understand what happened with others but one of the key lessons that we learned with this study was about relevance of data data is the base of knowledge and one of the important things that uh is clear from this study is that um the most of these Technologies are data dependent so if your data is not good enough and you are using for example your sets of data with errors or inconsistencies to train AI you’re going to have um uh you’re going to have a lot of uh problems with the results of these algorithms they’re going to advise you in the wrong way or they are not going to help you in fact they are going to propagate the error that we already have in the data what I want to highlight is data is the source of knowledge if you don’t have good data you are not able to know what is happening in public procurement if you want to fight corruption or if you want to prevent corruption good data is key to understand what is happening is key to measure what is happening and is also key to to understand what you can do in the future is very very critical I would thereare to say to try to change public procurement if you really don’t understand where you are currently and with this I ended my presentation over to you lawence thank you thank you very much Isabelle I’m taking control I hope um so to be here um is it okay yes okay um so thank you very much and I really appreciate being part of this online event dealing with a Hot Topic which makes the anti-corruption governance and public procurement issues and my purpose will be to introduce or present the way uh the European Union actually is dealing with uh um the fight against corruption uh under the EU procurement framework uh so with regard to this fight the EU has already developed a number of tools and the directives the EU directives on public procurement uh that govern and harmonize procedures for the award of public procurement contracts and concessions um among the 27 member states these directives already in include Provisions designed to ban corruption from public procurement uh and these Provisions actually were significantly enriched in the latest edition of the directives in 2014 however uh I think there is a major weakness because the principle of Integrity per se is not actually part of the fundamental principles of public procurement in these directives um along with the other principle such as transparency equal access and non-discrimination so actually there are different way to detect cases of corruption through the public procurement uh processes several entry points that could be during the preparation stage during the planning the identification of the needs or even sometimes unsolicited proposals coming from companies uh there is the second moment second stage uh what we call the formation stage uh where you can have some non-competitive procedures chosen by the Contracting authorities an impaired selection process some cases of collision uh no transparency or very limited transparency and then there is the execution phase or actually the contract implementation where you can have cases of fraud uh performance failure and the issues during the supply chain but the key part that we are going to explore is actually during uh the selection process what we call sometimes as well the eligibility or qualification of companies are they going to be allowed or not to participate in the procurement process and the assessment of their credentials is essential they are going the Contracting authorities will have to assess the financial technical uh credentials capacities the skills the previous records of the company and also their legal capacities and so under the legal capacities uh we have actually um a quite detailed article under the directive which is article 57 which deal with automatic exclusion of companies grounds for automatic exclusion for example related to cases of former corruption money lering financing terrorism child labor or things like that so things that usually well need to be actually uh declared so by a court or a Justice decision and then there is a second category of facultative optional not mandatory grounds for exclusion where you find bankruptcy grave professional misconduct collusive agreements conflict of interest and so on and of course this category and this separation of categories that’s something which is actually quite uh um common in other legal system dealing with public procurement but this second category of non-mandatory creates some issues U for the Contracting authorities because then they need by themselves to assess uh the situation and to be able to decide if actually the company will or not will not be able to participate so all of this work is of course based on documents information and data produced uh by the system or by given sent by the companies themselves so it’s very important at that that point of course the way these data are collected uh and so this is where digitalization can of course play an important role um and in this in this area there is actually an interesting decision from the European court of justice of last December of 2023 in that case uh a company um challenge uh decision an exclusion decision u based on the decision made by the competition authority of Portugal and um the there was of course a complaint before a tribunal in Portugal but then the issue went to uh the European court of justice and in this decision the European court of justice decided that it’s the job of the Contracting authority to decide and not a preview other entity which of course emphasize the fact that it’s more complicated for Contracting authorities because they will have to decide by themselves and this create also an issue of disharmonize among EU member states and even in one country you may have different Contracting authorities which may give a different have a different approach and uh so it’s in for the consistency of the the the corruption issues and the analysis of corruption issues this is clearly uh something which is quite complicated and so in that in that decision the European court of justice insisted on the fact that it is really to increase the Integrity of the system that the this this role should um be taken by the Contracting authorities only and uh actually one the other part of the decision which was interesting is that um uh according to the court uh if the Contracting Authority decides not to exclude a company based on such facultative optional cases this decision can be challenged as well so other comp companies may also uh bring a complaint about this approach another part of this article 57 is about selfcleaning or compliance how companies can actually uh get rid of uh potential exclusion so it means that uh for the moment we still have um even if we have common directives dealing with public procurement and Corruption issues we still have have some uh disharmonize views on and ways to assess compliance for example uh although now it’s easier to collect some data through more recent directives such as of course the C SRD directive or the corporate social due diligence directive which is very recent and to finish I will just say that exchanging data about exclusion is quite challenging in because it means first that you need to collect correct data as mentioned by Isabel earlier uh then you need to go through the digitalization process of these data and the issue was also underlined by by Gabriela that we have different ways of digitalizing this this data but then uh what about the impact of these data on the national system uh to really get have to have a very efficient procurement system you need to have a way to exchange data and even inside the countries the EU countries within the countries it’s still quite complicated even in France uh we are just starting a pilo pilot process with two uh three platforms because we do not have one centralized platform it’s already an issue in France uh trying to organize an exchange an efficient exchange of procurement data so uh there is there are issues within the countries themselves then you have also an EU impact so how do you really exchange data between EU member states and then at the international level of course it’s getting even more complicated and what illustrates uh the weaknesses of these current system is that there are there is now a new proposal a new directive uh which has been just discussed and which is about combating corruption and uh and there is in this directive a article about public procurement so public procurement will be part of this uh new uh organization of the fight uh against corruption in the EU among EU member states trying to have a more harmonized and structured way to address corruption and imposing exchange of information among among EU member states so now uh I give the floor to Chris um for the rest thank you yeah you have to unmute yourself Chris thank you very much lauron and and greeting several of my former students from iaka are are in the audience today very nice to see you all and very glad you could join um i i g to I’m GNA I’m the closing person on this on this series to kind of bring this narrative Arc together we’ve been talking to you about different anti-corruption strategies as theyve played out and you’ll see not only in the European Union but in the United States around the world and the the all the pieces fit together I want to take a step back as I do with my classes at iaka when I talk about procurement issues because many of the folks in the in the iaka classes are not procurement people and they’re from outside they working other aspects of anticorruption so I just want to explain how the pieces fit together here with anti-corruption in every procurement decision since back to the dawn of time back to Roman times there are three basic things that have to be addressed addressed it it’s the price and that’s pretty obvious it’s it’s the technical aspect how will the contractor address the problem that’s the technical aspect and will the contractor be able to do that successfully the third element looks at the contractor itself what are the qualifications of the contractor and you can as you can see the the the the second and the third elements overlap in some ways but we can really deal with contractor qualifications how do I feel about Apple how do I feel about Toyota as a contractor that’s contractor qualifications and a lot of the anti-corruption discussion in the in the procurement world and there’s a huge overlap between anti-corruption and procurement because about maybe 40% of corruption has to do with procurement a lot of the overlap has to do with contractor qualification and that’s why we’ve been focusing today on contractor qualification now one of the things that we really worked very hard in Thea courses is the correlation between good procurement and anti-corruption when we started the courses there were actually a significant number of voices in the procurement World which if you’re an anti-corruption you don’t really hear these voices but there were a significant number of voices in the procurement world that said anti-corruption is just a pain in the neck anti-corruption just slows down the procurement process we have to stop all these anti-corruption efforts because they’re making procurement so much more difficult and we have to figure out how to deal with those voices and the answer is and a lot of this has been developed through the coursework we’ve done at iaka is that anti-corruption and good procurement are actually the same thing if you look at the systems that are used for dealing with anti-corruption in procurement things like contractor compliance contractor exclusion the issues we’re talking about today effective competition all those things which are about good procurement are also about anti-corruption coruption that they work hand inand and that’s a very important Insight that iak has helped us um develop over the last decade because it means that the two camps don’t have to fight with each other they can actually work together and what I want to talk about today is is how we put those pieces together I’m going to be using a case study of international agreements international trade agreements just for political reasons we disc when our subsequent conversation with poan we’ll talk about Alternatives but the simplest way to do it right now is through trade agreements I just want to before I go forward to I also want to look backwards so for those of you who are thinking about anti-corruption in procurement in your countries I hope you’ve seen the building blocks that we’ve talked about today first of all there’s almost certainly going to be legal changes and there are models out there for instance the uncitral the UN Commission on International Trade law that’s a model there are models in the EU there are models in the US there are many models now out there for affecting change on the legal side there’s also technical changes that’s what Gabriela and Isabelle were talking about the technical changes that you have to make the systems those are very important and they’re really very critical because how the technical change is done affects how effective an anti-corruption tool will be there also has to be this is what Lance is focusing on in the in in the infrastructurist decision from the court of justice to the European Union there has to be an assignment of roles and and I just want to make I want to really emphasize a point that Lance made which was there was a serious discussion over the last few years of Shifting the exclusion and debarment function out of the procuring agencies and into some other centralized agency in the EU member states we tried that we talked about that in the United States there was a near Riot people were so upset about the idea of moving the debarment and exclusion function out of the proc uring agencies and into a centralized agency say why why not we have the FBI the FBI the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a centralized anti-corruption agency why not centralize the debarment exclusion the answer is anti-corruption and good procurement are tied together and so if you rip them apart and you move anti-corruption into a separate part of the government it’s going to be impossible to integrate it with the decision made by peuan entities that goes to reputational risk and performance risk posed by the contractor and that includes corruption so you want to integrate them by keeping that function if at all possible in the procuran entity the last part that I hope you’ve picked up and this is a big part of why Gabriela was talking about the networks that we have is how important Civil Society is civil society plays a very important role in integrating these various voices to bring together coherent reform and I and and that’s a very important part of what iaka does helping Civil Society bring those various voices together so we just have a couple slides I just want to go through very quickly when we I’m going to use the words exclusion in the barment interchangeably because an individual Contracting official makes a decision to exclude I don’t want to use apple I don’t want to use apple or let’s use bur example Boeing I don’t want to buy an airplane ticket where I have to fly on a Boeing aircraft because I don’t trust them I don’t trust the vendor that’s a performance risk assessment or you may say I don’t want to hire a particular contractor as part of the qualification because they’re known as being corrupt and so I don’t want to taint my government by buying from them that’s a qualification decision so that’s an exclusion decision made by the Contracting official our view our national experience is that at a higher level the aarring official makes it exactly the same decision it’s just he or she is making that decision on a government why basis so exclusion and dearment are interchangeable and we’re hoping that in the next round of directives in the European Union that’s more that’s clarified in the in the European Union in the member states now when you’re talking about exchanging dearment and exclusion information you’re really talking about sharing contractor qualification information and how you do this and and the folks at um the the team at the University of Vienna and at the central European University which is housed now in Vienna they’ve put together a product called tender x.u I highly recommend it to you tender x.u is their product where they’re bringing together qualification information from around the world they they produce very expensive reports if you’re trying thinking oh should I hire this contractor they’ll do for you a curated report for €600 EUR pulling in information from any many different databases I’m not necessarily recommending that I am recommending the model of because it’s very interesting because it’s pulling in this contractor qualification information from around the world again it’s tender tender x.e so when you’re talking about setting up these systems and it means setting up an interchange for the systems that Isabelle was describing the first question is how will the information be exchanged and the second is what qualification and exclusion information will be available to the digital exchanges so well you say well that’s not two separate questions that’s one question it’s what how will we set up a system for example to exchange information between Bolivia and the United States on contractor qualification risk that’s just one question the problem is it isn’t really and that’s is where the legal issues come in because in some systems information is not transparent it’s not so for example in our system contractor performance information is not available publicly that’s because the contractors have been able to persuade the government that this is proprietary information foreigners people outside the United States say that this is insane of course performance information is public information because it’s performance on a public contract and yet it isn’t necessarily available so these are the issue of what information will be available is actually different from how it’ll be available how will it be available once it’s once there’s a political and legal decision to make it available how will it be available it’s obvious it’s through public databases that would be available to other countries as well importantly to citizens of the state themselves that are paying for these products next question is which government agency did the exclusion a procuring entity that’s an important because if I’m sitting in Bolivia and I want to rely on contractor qualification information from the United States as a Bolivian procurement official and i’ I’ve talked about this with procurement officials in Bolivia they want to know that it’s a procuring entity in the United States that it isn’t a political decision that’s been made to exclud the contractor but that it’s actually a procuring entity just like them in Bolivia that’s had to assess performance risk they rely actually it’s much the the procuring enti is going to rely on another procuran entity in another government much more than they’re going to rely for example on the the centralized government for as a a practical example the central government in the United States not the procuring entities but the central government has excluded certain Chinese vendors because of perceived Espionage risk that’s largely a political decision and other procuring entities in other countries the the Bolivian Contracting official may say look that’s a decision that the United States made for for geopolitical reasons but we don’t want to buy into that decision necessarily the next question is who is the vendor who exactly is the vendor and you say well that’s that’s pretty pretty easy yeah we we can identify the vendor but that ties into the next question why was the vendor found non-qualified or excluded and you said well that’s obvious if you’re if you’re going to exclude a contractor look this is the infrastructurist case this is what what what Professor folio was talking about of course you’ll publish the reason for why you’re excluding the answer from the United States is no we don’t publish the reason it’s insane we don’t publish the reason we only publish a list we a contract will be listed as excluded but we don’t publish the reason why do we not publish the reason the answer is we’re lazy the agents are lazy they don’t want to be bothered with people calling up saying well you know you excluded this contract for this reason let’s talk about this they don’t want to have court challenges so they just publish a list the list is basically useless because if I’m a Bolivian procuring entity a Contracting official in Bolivia in laaz I can’t just rely on a list because again I don’t know if the United States has excluded the contractor for political reasons so I can’t rely on a list alone I need to know the reasons so this issue of publishing reasons is actually really important and by the way the reason I know American agencies are lazy is because a close friend of mine who used to be debarring official he published the reasons he proved that it’s easy to publish the reasons but the American agencies don’t because they have they don’t have to they’re not required by law to publish reasons if they were in the European Union they’d be required to publish the reasons that’s what the infrastructurist decision is all about it’s this is a really where comparative law becomes really important because it begins to show the obvious failures in agencies certainly in in my own country the last is how is the department done is the process reliable and you think well this is you know this is pretty obvious it’s actually not so obvious I was talking to a student yesterday who comes from a country in the Caribbean country in the Caribbean the the the exclusion process is done on an ad hoc basis there’s not a clear process in her country and among other things that raises significant risk risks that the excluding official the debarring official will himself be corrupted he will be bribed so when you have an incoherent process without a clear accountability you potentially have a real problem so this the question of process is very important and our hope is that the European Union in the next directive regularizes the process for the member states so that other nations around the world can rely then on the exclusion information from the European Union m States so the way forward to deal with this as part of the digitalization process is to put this in free trade agreements you can put this this is the simplest easiest way to do it because free trade agreements are moving forward relatively rapidly there’s no we talked to Dean and we talked about the beginning of the process the dean was very involved with the UN convention against corruption I asked a few years ago I asked a the guy who got God Rest his soul he’s a wonderful guy and he’s not with us any longer but I asked him who he’s a key unai unak official in the UN I said when will the UN convention against corruption be amended and he looked at me in complete horror no no that’s not gonna happen no no no so it’s the the unak in many ways is frozen and so unak doesn’t become a good vehicle for doing this the free trade agreements are a possible good vehicle and I used to used to hear an example the US Mexico Canada agreement talking about why you can exclude contracts because this is a sensitive trade issues if you can just just in a in a very arbitrary way exclude a contractor from a country you don’t like you got a problem so trade agreements tend to start to map this out the next generation of trade agreements could address the issues we just talked about in the previous slide they could address how vendor information be exchanged what information exchange which agency should make the decision who is excluded why they’re excluded how vendors are excluded and if you don’t if you don’t lay out a clean process a clear process there’s another set of agreement called bilateral investor treaties bilateral investment treaties have very significant procurement elements to them there could well be challenges under bilateral investment treaties if the exclusion in the bment process as it gains momentum is not done in a well structured manner because that could be there could be challenges under bilateral investment treaties so it makes sense to to make sense of this world in the through the free trade agreements that are evolving and are relatively flexible relatively fluid compared to the UN convention against corruption with that I’ll stop talking and and turn the the floor over to you po thank you so much and so much to talk about and so much uh new information which we got uh I will very quickly summarize but there are some questions which are coming up and we have few questions which is very relevant uh I will I’ll Poe that so as Gabriela mentioned about the joint procurement which is very important and and you know maybe the in the international scenario and the qualification of economic operators uh Isabel you mentioned about the quality of data and the problem and the training and and of course uh uh techn technology to connect the National Database my question will next come is about the international database so uh we will come there uh we will uh we also talked about uh uh The Learning Experience basically that we had so uh that that was again you know if you have already learned and some uh things are happening then how we how we can bring it there in our system uh and Lawrence you talked about selfcleaning and uh you know basically the compliance system so uh and in total I think U Chris yukin already mentioned bringing everything together and uh on uh procurement but I have a few questions but let me first take the question which is uh available there uh Mr slav redo he he asked question it says to Professor raaka uh digitization of procurement begs the question of algorithm that will be worked out and how the adjudication of public procurement or purchasing with their use or could or should meet the anti-corruption standards and Norms this is one part of the question and second is what sort of controlling procedures and he gives an example the source code for example could or should be used should be in place or do we have have any good practices can I answer yes please ah okay H well a huge question the problem is that we consider to evolve platform and maybe platform that would uh have algorithm to order the the the offer that we receive but the the the difference is and this also Isabelle can help me um we don’t want to have a blackbox like uh the big e-commerce platform we want to evolve platform with a a well defined algorithm and a choice that can be done according to all the principle that we wanted that isata of any procurement system so the problem is to evolve this platform but having inside for the choice public algorithm that will um um not include and discrimination or any other issues that we have in private platform so we have the now in in Europe the G gatekeeper um the digital service act that has this discipline on the gatekeeper with the big big platform so that will be a an issue but also for developing in the public administration uh also platform for doing procurement in Italy we have this the experience of certificated platform that should guarantee all this for uh traceability and this kind of um quality of the selection and we are we would like to develop also platform for below threshold contracts for very little contract as value but that provide the possibility to have all the trustability of the process and also the evaluation of the quality the reputation the customer satisfaction and so on so I think this is a a very important um sector in which development of digitalization will really change the experience of procurement for for the public sector so I I really believe there’s a lot to do but there’s also um it’s not so far the the possibility to reach this kind kind of also little platform that can help new way of doing procurement okay thank you so much uh I have another question which is very Broad and then there is a very specific question linked to that on on the uh in the Box one is that what are the key challenges uh for sharing procurement data across borders you know and and especially when we have different types of privacy laws and the specific question here actually goes similar that uh how does does the data Exchange in public procurement interact with gdpr restrictions both domestically and internationally so uh there is some more mention of other part but let me have this uh if you have any uh comments on that any anyone in the in the panel I may also give a few words I would say that in the that is not such a big challenge because we we have eforms and eforms basically they are uh setting a standard for the information that is used in the eprocurement systems so when we want to exchange we know what is what uh so it doesn’t mean we don’t have any challenge we still have a few challenge because of different language for example but the standard the structured information is organized more and less the same way at the national level we can have more information but the core pieces of information are basically the same across the EU if we think outside of the EU yeah the challenge is very big but we don’t have what we call a global CH uh standard ocp or ocds uh the standard that is uh produced by ocp basically can play that role because it’s a global standard for publishing information and can be used also toch information but I would dare to say that the key here is about having open data if you have the information on public procurement with the open data format that means this information is available with a tag in the sense you know that is the price of the contract that is the estimated value you know that is the name of the the buyer the name of the seller you H you know what is what and you can get this information for your own needs so if all of us provide information in open data although we don’t have a unique standard yet or maybe this will never happen in the future but the data is available and you know what it is so basically the point is not giving transparency just for showing what we are doing but providing transparency in an accountable way in accountable way I give you this information so you can reuse it for me this is a very important key point because this doesn’t Define any borders for any country and at the international level you can do it another challenge of course is where you can find this open data information but some countries like um can have a central point to provide this information and I know if I want to get information from the United states where to get it the problem is in some countries this doesn’t happen you have this information spread through multiples uh um institutions and multiple systems and it’s very difficult to get a cohesive vision of what exists and what you need and how you can use it and that’s my contribution Laurence has to speak something yeah lence go ahead yes thank you uh yes of course uh according to the privacy laws that are different from one country to another and also many countries do not have privacy laws as well so in that country it’s easier I would say uh but uh under the EU of course we have a common regulation and protection of data personal data uh but there are some exception even in that uh in that regulation uh for the exchange of information about Criminal um investigation for example with third countries meaning countries outside the EU so there are already some some cases uh but um if this um model was already so um efficient we would not need to have this new uh proposal this new directive and clearly the purpose of the this new directive on corruption in in the EU tend to harmonize and uh Foster the exchange of of information so it’s really important but just to give you an example of the the differences among system when you have the World Bank uh publishing a list of debard companies and even the board individuals has being consultant this is something unbelievable from a EU perspective we cannot have such list uh on a public accessible website site with the name and the address of the the individuals so the difference of the approach are clearly clearly there to be taken into consideration thank you thank you yes Chris very much we had couple questions I wanted to responded to over in the chat I apologize I can’t ask the chat I would have responded directly but also um I think it’s good to to bring it together for the group um the um and a couple of them from Sandy Burma who a is a dear former student um so the one of the questions that sandep asked is if we have more information is there going to be more effective cross de bment um we had the idea so 10 years ago we thought wouldn’t automatic cross debarment be a wonderful idea that if you were debarred in Tanzania you’re automatically debarred in the United States so that because that would terrify the contractors they want to be very very good in Tanzania so they wouldn’t be debarred elsewhere automatically and automatic cross debarment has really failed because except for for example among the multilateral development Banks um the automatic cross dearment is too probably too severe among other things it takes away the possibility of a Contracting official to say hey I’m going to exclude you or debarring official I’m going to ex I’m going to debar you they that gives them leverage the fact that they’re not automatically bound they have leverage then with the contractor and they may actually want to work with a contractor the joke I always tell is that to be very clear when we’re talking about contractor qualification the everyone says oh we would never want a contract with a with a Criminal many people in our intelligence Community here in the United States want to contract with criminals because criminals do intelligence work very effectively that’s their they do it very well there’s a there’s a link so the individual agencies have different approaches to the risk profile and this this ties into Anna Maria’s question about the how you how you deal with the contractor who may five years ago have a bad report card and now has a good report card and also with Sand’s question about how you’re dealing with the the issue of making sure that the the contractor compliance systems are being checked the the core problem here is one of agency indifference the in in economic terms in organizational economics by coincidence is called a principal agent problem it’s the idea that the government official is indifferent because she’s not flying the airplane or she’s not the one drinking the water and because of this indifference they don’t make sure that they get the most recent information the answer to these questions to both questions which is one is how do you deal with more recent information the answer is you fire the Contracting official who isn’t good about the most recent information just as like we fire ourselves if we’re not very careful about reviewing the best my wife will fire me if I don’t do a very careful job reviewing which car we should buy okay that also solves the compliance system problem right now in in the US compliance programs don’t have to be submitted at the federal government level until after war and are they ever submitted no because I know this because Contracting officials are in my classes they’re never submitted no one submits them no one reads them cu no one cares but they should care the Contracting official should care they should be reading the these compliance plans there’s it’s a question of accountability for the Contracting officials in public systems because of civil service protections it’s very difficult to fire the Contracting official so you have to build in other measures of accountability like bid challenges to make sure that people look at these compliance plans the big picture here pan it’s a riskmanagement effort it’s a riskmanagement effort and you have to create institutional structures to encourage the Contracting officials to take that risk management effort seriously thank you so much and you have taken all the questions so I think I don’t have any additional question and time is also getting over uh a quick uh information to all of you who are participating that the dean of aaka Miss laana tasa has shared the UN resolution of CP 23 so it’s a good document to look at and uh how International Community is handling you know the corruption issues because as Chris also mentioned that there are two very clear thing the governance of procurement and Corruption or controlling corruption actually they have to go hand in hand and uh as Chris you mentioned that uh who is reading the document you know and perhaps people are lazy or it’s it’s for reason you don’t know maybe even technology can be also leveraged here because now with large language model coming up I think if feeding the document will throw up all the important elements from from the contracts so perhaps that’s another area we should look at and one last question is about you know we always talked about proro I think uh I’m not sure how proro is progressing with u in you know problems in Ukraine but I think it’s a very good model uh which we heard about but any any last response on this from the panel well um I’ve not been following uh the developments of proro very closely any anymore uh but I saw a demonstration recently uh something like three months ago they are still I was quite surprised uh they are still heavily investing in developing more functionalities uh in their system and uh what impressed me most is they are at War and the resources are very limit and I guess the pressure is huge and the time response uh should be very very uh small for them to um uh answer all the requests they have currently in terms of procurement um but they have done a lot uh that’s what I can tell you and their model is very interesting in terms of data management because they are different because their database is Central and they allow different interface or different Market solutions to connect to the data to to to the central database that means they control and they know what is happening in public procurement because they own the data but they don’t they are not so worried with the tools and the technology and this is a very smart approach because the tools really can be decentralized and you be free to choose whatever you like most but for the information you want to keep the control on your own so you have the knowledge and you can be able to measure and know what is happening Chris Chris you have something to add yeah you’re on mute on please unmute yourself a technical point and a political point so the technical point on what Isabelle says very important because the us right now is using Amazon as they’re Outsourcing the procurement function many agencies to on and they don’t have that interface that Isabelle has been talking about and that the ukrainians have in prora they have the interface so the data is coming into the government and the government can use the data from this through this electronic Marketplace not true in the Amazon model here in the United States so very important difference with prora the second is is a political observation which is so I wrote an article on this with with Professor kelman from Harvard and if you look back I because I can get translations of the Ukrainian press the Ukrainian press was mocking U president zalinski just before the invasion because there were contracts they found this from Bora there were contracts being given to a studio that hide that hide T remember Professor the president zalinski he was the voice of Paddington the bear in The Paddington he did the Russian language version of Paddington the bear he’s a professional actor and he was being mocked because Studios that he were aligned he’s Al he was aligned with were getting contracts was on prora and that was just before the war so very important part of the political dialogue in Ukraine after the invasion after February 2022 the Ukrainian shut down the transparent aspect it the open question is was it for security or for just reasons of the fact that they had to divert resources Ukraine opened up pror again for non-military procurement they opened up preser so we in the procurement Community always wonder is transparency really important to government legitimacy and the answer is Ukraine proves it because for Ukraine the legitimacy of the government is the key to maintaining the Integrity of their country they can only hold their country together by maintaining the legitimacy of the government and they’ve decided that transparency and procurement is a critical part of that they’ve reopened prora to the public really important historical lesson from the ukrainians thank you po thank you so much and I I’m sure that uh whatever we discuss today will also be applicable uh a lot of things can be applicable in other various countries Beyond EU uh but I don’t have time to go for more details because we are running out of time a last comment which is in the chat is about building capacities where procurement and anti-corruption can be brought together and yes we this is what aaka is doing uh and uh if anybody’s interested to know more about it you are very very you welcome to join us so with this I will thank all the panelists uh Laurence Isabel Gabriela and Chris and of course our Dean Lana she has been here listening to all of you and uh it has been pleasure and everyone around the world who joined uh this uh event and think I hope you learned something uh which is useful for you uh this uh recording will be available on aaka website and with this I thank all of you and say goodbye goodbye thank you very much bye bye have a goodbye thank you bye bye