Red flags in public contracts: OpenTender to OpenCorporates

Red flags in public contracts are observable irregularities in procurement records that indicate potential fraud, corruption, or conflict of interest in the award of government contracts. Practitioners scan contract data across multiple fields, award values, supplier relationships, tender timelines, and procedural records, to identify anomalies that depart from competitive procurement norms. The method draws on open contracting data standards and official procurement portals to surface patterns that warrant investigative scrutiny.

The method applies when investigating high-value contracts awarded to politically connected suppliers, tracing beneficial ownership through shell structures, verifying declared values against actual payments, or monitoring a public body's award patterns for repeat single-supplier contracts. A short tender window or a single bid is, on its own, ambiguous. The pattern, corroborated across registries and disclosure records, is not.

PRO-002 sets out the methodology for identifying, investigating, and documenting red flags in public contracts to evidentiary standard.

A PDF version of PRO-002 is available below for Signal subscribers.

RELATED READING
OSINT Reference Card: Procurement database investigation, for the upstream portal identification and dataset download steps that feed this workflow.OSINT Reference Card: Company registry research across jurisdictions, for the Companies House and OpenCorporates methodology this card invokes at the supplier-screening step.