Balkan Corruption Insider is an open-source platform that won the #HackCorruption Balkans 2024 hackathon, supported by AccountabilityLab and Development Gateway. It analyzes public procurement data across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, and North Macedonia to detect corruption patterns and enhance transparency.
Flags procurement procedures with lower transparency requirements — direct agreements and negotiated procedures. These procedure types bypass competitive bidding and are statistically associated with higher corruption risk.
Identifies awards where only one or zero bids were received. Low competition may indicate pre-arranged contracts, restrictive technical specifications designed to favour a specific supplier, or market manipulation.
Cross-references all awarded suppliers against the OpenSanctions database. Any match between a procurement winner and a sanctioned individual or entity is flagged as a high-priority risk alert.
Uses company registry data to identify cases where competing bidders in the same procedure share common owners or founders — a strong indicator of bid rigging or collusion.
Flags contracts signed within 90 days before a national or local election. Procurement activity tends to spike before elections as a mechanism for distributing political patronage using public funds.
This project is fully open-source. The methodology, data pipelines, and codebase are available for review, contribution, and reuse by researchers, journalists, and civil society.
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