radar-contratos

Procurement red-flag analyzer — "follow the money" for Portuguese public contracts

Status: early planning. Loose project description; scope and architecture still being worked out.

The idea

All public contracts in Portugal are published on base.gov.pt (Portal BASE), as required by the Código dos Contratos Públicos. The data is public — but the portal is useless for analysis. The value is in turning that compliance data into accountability signals.

The wedge is narrow on purpose: one lens, done well — flag patterns around ajuste direto (direct award without real competition):

• Contract-splitting — multiple awards to the same supplier kept just under the legal value threshold to avoid an open tender.
• Repeat winners — the same supplier repeatedly awarded by the same contracting entity, especially via direct award.
• Timing spikes — award bursts before elections or at fiscal year-end.
• Concentration — share of an entity's spend going to its top N suppliers.

Journalist-bait, citizen-legible, and an uncontested analysis moat: the data is open, but nobody packages the red flags.

Prior art / why this isn't redundant

• base.gov.pt itself: has search + some entity-relationship features + annual PDF reports, but no red-flag / pattern / network analysis and a clunky UI. The data is the commodity; the analysis layer is the gap.
• Context: in a recent year, ajuste direto was the single most frequent procedure type (>112k direct awards). Plenty to analyze.

Ratings (re-derived)

• Effort to MVP: weeks (data ingest is the work; analyses start simple)
• Upkeep: low–moderate (periodic re-ingest; analyses are mostly static logic)
• Money: none / grants — public good
• Fit: high — accountability gravitas, high citation potential, reuses civic pipeline

Design principles

• Signpost, not accusation. A red flag is a question, not a verdict — always link to the underlying contract on base.gov.pt; "isto não é uma acusação" framing.
• One lens deep before breadth. Ship the ajuste direto analysis fully before adding concursos, suppliers networks, etc.

Open questions (to resolve before building)

• Data access: bulk download vs. scraping base.gov.pt; is there a usable export / open dataset on dados.gov.pt, or do we replay the portal's backend calls?
• Thresholds: current legal value thresholds for ajuste direto / consulta prévia, and how they've changed over time (needed to detect splitting correctly).
• Entity identity: matching suppliers/entities across records (NIF as key; name variants).

Relation to siblings

Shares the scrape → store → classify → present skeleton with o-que-mudou. Cross-referencing winners against political donations / beneficial ownership / declared interests is a later idea (its own project), explicitly out of scope for this MVP.