Public tender investigation: notice to payment record

Block

07 · Corporate, Financial & Legal

Topic

Procurement Investigation

Tools

TED · OCDS Data Portal · OpenSpending · OpenOwnership

Difficulty

Intermediate

Prerequisites

Tutorial 35: Website deconstruction: WHOIS, DNS, SSL and BuiltWith.

Public contracts leave a paper trail investigators can follow

Every government procurement decision produces documents: notices, bids, awards, amendments, payment records. These records are legally mandated in most jurisdictions and increasingly published in structured formats. The investigator’s task is to locate them, link them and identify where the paper trail breaks.

Procurement fraud is one of the highest-value corruption vectors in government spending. Award manipulation, phantom contractors, inflated unit prices and kickback arrangements all leave traces in tender documentation, company registration filings and payment records. The challenge for investigators is not usually absence of data but fragmentation: notices sit on one portal, company records on another, payments on a third.

This tutorial builds the workflow for linking those sources into a coherent document chain. You will work from tender notice to contract award to beneficial owner to payment record, using open procurement standards data where available and national portal searches where it is not.

In the field

OCCRP and its Kenyan partner Africa Uncensored used leaked Pandora Papers documents to pierce two decades of offshore secrecy around Kenya’s Anglo Leasing scandal, in which eighteen government contracts worth $751 million were awarded without competitive bidding to unknown shell companies.

Award pattern flagged. The contracts, for services from passport printing to an oceanographic vessel, went to companies with no operating history and no public record of having competed for the work.
Beneficial owner tracing. Leaked offshore service-provider files linked businessman Anura Perera to at least six of the shell companies as director, owner or signatory, ownership that shifted from director to owner only once international probes were dropped.
Cross-source corroboration. Reporters matched the offshore filings against Kenya’s own 2006 Anti-Corruption Commission letter naming Perera as a suspect, tying one individual to the same companies across nearly two decades of documentation.

OCCRP · Africa Uncensored · Pandora Papers · 2024

Learning outcomes

By the end of this tutorial you will be able to:

Locate tender notices and contract award data on EU, national and international procurement portals
Parse Open Contracting Data Standard records to extract award value, supplier and timeline
Identify red-flag patterns in procurement data including single-bidder awards and post-issue incorporations
Link procurement records to company registry and beneficial ownership data
Document a procurement document chain to evidentiary standard

The rest of this tutorial is for Signal subscribers.

What remains: the decision framework, the tool configuration, the failure modes, and the evidentiary standard required to use the finding defensibly. Signal is €90 a year, or €9 a month. Students, €49 a year.

Join Signal

A Signal subscription gives you:

Full OSINT Reference Card library, 21 domains
Methods, every tradecraft tutorial in full
AI in OSINT, every prompt and field report
Shadow Analysis, every forensic dossier

Link tender awards to beneficial owners and payment data

Public contracts leave a paper trail investigators can follow

Learning outcomes

The rest of this tutorial is for Signal subscribers.

A Signal subscription gives you:

Keep Reading