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Bids are disqualified if not submitted by the single tenderer of the winning bid.
See also: R038 - Excessive disqualified bids

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Methodology

A contracting process is flagged if:
  • Exactly one tenderer submitted one or more bids that are valid (i.e. qualified).
  • The tenderer of the valid bids and the suppliers of all active awards are the same.
  • At least 1 other tenderer submitted a bid that was disqualified. (1 is the threshold.)
The winner is also flagged.
ExampleThe National Rail Service receives five bids. It disqualifies four bids, and awards the contract to the remaining bid from CorruptX Solutions.
Why is this a red flag?A corrupt buyer can award the pre-determined bidder by disqualifying other bidders’ bids.
Based on “Exclusion of all but one bid” in An Objective Corruption Risk Index Using Public Procurement Data and “Prevalence of faulty bids” in Toolkit for detecting collusive bidding in public procurement.

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Output

The indicator’s value for the contracting process is the number of unique tenderers with disqualified bids. The indicator’s value for the tenderer is always 0.0. If the --map command-line flag is set, the Maps key contains:
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ocid_tenderer_r035
map
The flagged tenderers for each flagged ocid.

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Configuration

All configuration is optional. If you observe many false positives among contracting processes with few submitted bids, you can increase the threshold. To override the default threshold, add to your settings file:
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R035.threshold
integer
default:1
Minimum number of tenderers with disqualified bids required to flag the process. Must be at least 1.
[R035]
threshold = 1 # default

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Exclusions

A contracting process is excluded if:
  • An award’s status is pending or invalid.

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Implementation Details

The indicator (from src/indicators/r035.rs):
  • Collects all supplier IDs from complete active awards
  • Tracks tenderer IDs from valid and disqualified bids
  • Only applies to single tenderers/winners (multiple winners are excluded)
  • Counts the number of disqualified tenderers that are not the winning tenderer
  • Flags the process if the count meets or exceeds the threshold

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Demonstration

Input 
// Example OCDS release with one valid bid and multiple disqualified bids
Output 
ocdscardinal indicators --settings docs/examples/R/035.ini --no-meta docs/examples/R/035.jsonl

{"OCID":{"F":{"R035":1.0}},"Tenderer":{"V":{"R035":0.0}}}