Subcontracting Information

[practicalparticipation]

Subcontracting has been raised in a number of items of feedback, and is discussed also in #130.

subcontracting: I haven't seen anything on subcontracting. It is a mayor way for hiding money, corruption, and collusion. I would consider adding fields on it.

The current suggestions point towards including subcontracting information in the 'implementation/performance' phase, with an option to list:

• Subcontracts
• The ID of the party subcontracted
• The value of the subcontract
• The OCID of the subcontract

Given the amount of work to do on this, I would suggest it is for after 1.0 RC, but open to discussion....

[LindseyAM]

Ok - I copy my comment from #130 - and flag to @marcelarozo and @sdavenpo422 in case they have thoughts on this one.

So in the US, The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) was signed on September 26, 2006. The intent is to empower every American with the ability to hold the government accountable for each spending decision. The end result is to reduce wasteful spending in the government. The FFATA legislation requires information on federal awards (federal financial assistance and expenditures) be made available to the public via a single, searchable website, which is www.USASpending.gov.

The FFATA Subaward Reporting System (FSRS) is the reporting tool Federal prime awardees (i.e. prime contractors and prime grants recipients) use to capture and report subaward and executive compensation data regarding their first-tier subawards to meet the FFATA reporting requirements. Prime contract awardees will report against sub-contracts awarded and prime grant awardees will report against sub-grants awarded. The sub-award information entered in FSRS will then be displayed on www.USASpending.gov associated with the prime award furthering Federal spending transparency.

More info here: https://www.fsrs.gov/

I also found this reporting template for the US govt:
https://www.esrs.gov/documents/Individual_Subcontract_Report.pdf (but am not sure what the relationship is between the FSRS and the ESRS).

Here is a private sector example of a reporting template on subcontracting: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=9&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CF4QFjAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.beringseagroup.com%2Fdataforms%2Fgf430-subcontractor-data-collection.doc&ei=5LRDVJSZIY77sATK_oKoDw&usg=AFQjCNGDf6IlAW8mkygqw_wLIwZiXYQzmQ&sig2=uiai9mLV223HYOAEx0qZQA&bvm=bv.77648437,d.cWc

I believe there are some subnational US examples as well but off the top of my head I cant think of any other countries currently publishing (but would imagine that they are collecting).

[LindseyAM]

Also @practicalparticipation I notice that the anticorruption use case is tagged here but its demanded for monitoring (use case 4), and competing (use case 3) as well.

[birdsarah]

Giving this an "After 1.0" milestone.

Tim and I have discussed this a little before.

Just a couple of notes

• The intuitive thing is to nest contracting processes either with a "parent OCID" or nesting subcontracts in planning, or both. The problem with nesting is it gives rise to loads of ways to mis-represent data
• We could do a loosely coupled thing, which is where all subcontracts are published as OC processes and then are just referenced in the parent contract.

[practicalparticipation]

I think the loosely coupled approach, with some minor redundancy to given identifier, name and value of subcontract nested inside a parent contract, but cross-referencing to another OC process for the full details of the subcontract - is likely to be best.

Agreed that schema for this is After 1.0. However, the field work in Mexico suggested that this is an important thing for governments to think about collecting and managing, so I am looking at whether we can:

• Include subcontracting as a theme in our 'publication planner' tools (list of field groups, ranked basic, intermediate, advanced) for publishers;
• Indicate in the documentation that schema approaches to represent subcontracts will be forthcoming in future versions / extensions;

@LindseyAM would that be an acceptable approach? It gives us the policy push, even if we can't deliver the technical approach in 1.0 RC.

[LindseyAM]

Ok seems fair.

[timgdavies]

Note that the approach proposed in #72 here could be adapted to also work for pointing at subcontracts.

[duncandewhurst]

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations raised a question to the helpdesk regarding support for subcontracting (specifically payments to subcontractors) in OCDS and made the following comment:

"charities (and SMEs more widely) increasingly deliver public services as sub-contractors so the availability of payment data with unique identifiers etc is crucial. I’d like to better understand to what extent the implementation of the OCDS would address this."

[timgdavies]

Updated EU forms may capture list of known subcontractors in an award release.

When their are lots, it is important to know which lot has been subcontracted to which subcontractor

[duncandewhurst]

This is continued in #371