Make every public contract open for anyone to see, from the first plan through payment to the finished work
Steps to make it happen
- When a country or town pays for goods or construction, it keeps a record of every promise it makes.
- Governments publish what they plan to buy and how much they can spend before they ask anyone to do the work.
- Governments post online which companies applied, what prices they offered, and why one was chosen.
- Governments also write down who the true owners of the chosen company are.
- If the price or the terms change later, governments must publish the reason.
- Governments keep recording until payment, showing whether the goods or work arrived as promised.
- Towns and countries set up a place where residents and reporters can check the records and report anything strange.
- It becomes normal for anyone to follow tax money all the way to where it ends up.
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The proposal in detail
This proposal covers contracts in which national and local governments, public agencies, and publicly owned companies use tax money or other public funds to hire outside parties for goods, services, or construction. This is known as public procurement. Every contract above a certain amount is published individually, and small contracts are published in groups by type. What is published is not only the result at the moment the contract is signed. The record links everything into one continuous flow: the need and the expected budget at the planning stage, the public call for bids, the companies that took part and the price each one offered, the scoring standards and how the points were given, the company that was chosen and its real owners, the full text of the contract, any changes made along the way and the extra costs they brought, confirmation of delivery or completion, and the actual amounts paid and their dates. The records use a shared format that can be compared across countries and regions, can be read by machines, can be searched for free, and are kept without deletion for a set number of years. The agency that signed the contract is responsible for entering the information, and independent bodies in charge of auditing and public access to information check it. A safeguard could also be added, such as refusing to pay for any contract that has not been published. As exceptions, information that directly concerns national security, personal privacy, and legitimate trade secrets may be withheld, but the reason and the extent of what is withheld must be recorded, an independent body checks afterward whether it was justified, and in principle the information is released once a set period has passed. Emergency contracts that skip competition, such as those made during disasters, must also publish the same items within a deadline set for after the fact.
BenefitsPeople can follow the money and find fraud and waste sooner
When everything from planning to payment can be seen as one continuous record, signs of fraud and waste become easier to pick out in the numbers. Examples include the gap between the winning bid and the final amount paid, a pattern in which the same companies keep being chosen, and a large number of bids with only one participant. If real owners are also recorded, it becomes possible to check whether a company with ties to an official is quietly winning contracts. Not only oversight bodies but also many other eyes, such as reporters, researchers, and citizen groups, can check at the same time, so even with limited staff fewer problems are missed. Fraud becomes harder, and honest businesses can see who was chosen and under what conditions, which opens chances for newcomers to enter and may lead to better prices and quality through real competition. For the government too, comparing past contracts gives a sense of fair prices and helps in reviewing plans. If the data is published in a shared format, countries can be compared more easily, and it can also be used to check how international aid and loans are spent. Above all, being able to confirm how one's own tax money was used is a foundation for trust in government.
DrawbacksOpenness can help bid rigging and burden governments and companies
The concern raised most strongly by those who oppose this is that detailed disclosure could actually help wrongdoing. When each company's offered price and score breakdown can be seen in detail, it is said, businesses learn each other's hands and can more easily fix prices together through bid rigging. Companies also treat the makeup of their costs and their technical know-how as important secrets, and if strong companies dislike disclosure and withdraw from public work, competition might even grow weaker. Small local governments and public agencies may lack the staff and systems to keep entering every stage accurately, and their regular work could be squeezed. For small businesses too, the burden of reporting owners and filing paperwork can become a barrier to entry. In security and disaster-response contracts, where to draw the line on what is withheld may become a fight, and if the exceptions are used widely, there is a worry that the system will become only a show. Moreover, even if huge amounts of data are published, without people and skills to read it, it will not lead to finding fraud, and there is a danger that people feel reassured just because it was published. Another possible side effect is that officials, afraid of criticism, choose only safe purchases that follow past practice.
Learn the background
Public procurement, in which governments pay outside parties for goods and services, makes up a large part of public spending in many countries. It touches every part of life, from building roads, hospitals, and schools to buying stationery and computer systems. At the same time, it has been pointed out again and again around the world as an area where wrongdoing such as bribery, favoritism, bid rigging, and inflated billing easily happens. The problem is that much of the wrongdoing happens not at the moment the contract is signed but before and after it. Tricks such as writing requirements that go beyond what is needed so that only one company can respond, letting a company win with a low price and then adding costs through later changes, or paying for work that has not been finished cannot be seen by looking only at who won the bid. There are also cases where, through shell companies, relatives or associates of an official actually profit. In recent years electronic bidding has spread, and keeping records in digital form is no longer hard in itself. Even so, what is published and in what form differs from one agency to another, and it is still difficult for citizens to follow the flow of money from beginning to end. In emergencies such as disasters or disease outbreaks, urgent contracts increase, and there is also a tendency for things to become even less clear.
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It helps pay for the server and the AI's planting
This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-15d) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes