The specifications of more than a fortnight of public tenders from different municipalities and State-dependent bodies already contained the name of the successful bidder in the metadata before the tender was even published.
The total amount of these contracts made by administrations of Canary Islands, Galicia, Catalonia and Andalusia, and public entities, among which is the ENAIRE Foundation, Navantia or the Spanish Navy, exceeds six million euros.
In some cases, the winning companies or individuals appear as “authors” of the documents that establish the clauses of the contracts in which they end up being imposed on the rest of the participants and, in others, it appears in the titles of the specifications themselves.
This is demonstrated by an investigation carried out by ‘La Nueva España’ and ‘El Periódico de España’ thanks to a computer tool for massive analysis of tenders developed by the Asturian data scientists Manuel J. García Rodríguez and José Carlos Montes Luna.
The aforementioned tool tracks computer documents in PDF or Word format, which are the ones that the administration usually uses to articulate its contracts and that leave a trace through the so-called metadata.
Its traceability makes it possible to know the name of the teams that have created or modified the documents or the titles they had before they were uploaded to the Public Sector Contracting Platform.
INECO: 4.6 million euros
One of the largest contracts identified in the massive data analysis corresponds to INECO, the public engineering agency dependent on the Ministry of Transport. INECO tendered in February 2019 a macro-contract for the development of its “web application development and maintenance service, sap and mobility“. The contract, made up of three lots, was awarded to the company Ibermática SA for a total amount of 4.6 million euros, taxes included. The name “Ibermática SA” appears in the “author” field of one of the documents that establish the conditions of the contract that, finally, the Spanish company would end up winning.
INECO points out that the “coincidence” in the author field of one of the annexes of the specifications, the one that corresponds to the Service Level Agreements (ANS) is justified because the company had been awarded a previous contract with the same administration in which said conditions would have been established for the development and maintenance of the IT services of the public company. Thus, from the organism dependent on the Ministry of Transport they defend that did not measure “any irregularity” in the hiring process.
The document in which the coincidences have been found establishes many of the conditions of the future provision of the service. According to INECO, said document was exhaustively reviewed by its technical services. Other data that can be checked in the metadata of the Word file are the editing times and the dates of creation of the document.
The annex in which the coincidence appears was created on February 7, 2019 by a user called “Ibermática SA” and edited the following day by an INECO worker, just one month before the publication on the State Contracting Platform.
Ibermatic SA. It turned out, at the end of March, winner of the contest, imposing itself on the rest of companies that participated in the tender. According to the information published in the Contracting Platform, three companies attended the first batch in addition to the Spanish technology company. In the second batch there were six more offers in addition to that of Ibermática and, in the third, another three.
The company prevailed over the rest of the companies, whose offers and the scores that the technicians must give them within the contracting process do not appear in the Platform documents. After consulting INECO, from the entity they defend that, unlike public administrations, INECO is not obliged to publish said information.
The “coincidences” between the names of the authors of some of the documents of the contract specifications and the successful bidders also occur on a small scale in local entities and other public bodies in other parts of Spain.
Canary Islands: 50,000 euros
On September 20, 2019, the Tenerife Port Authority put out to tender the “implementation of an E-BANDEJA solution for the management of internal procedures”. To the tender, which had a budget of only 22,400 euros, Two companies showed up: ARTE Technological Consultants SL and SM Technology.
The offer of the second was somewhat cheaper, but in the subjective criteria of the contest, ARTE Consultores Tecnológicos obtained a higher score and, finally, won the IT contract for the port of Tenerife.
The specifications that governed the contract were prepared with the Word 2013 program and, as can be deduced from the metadata of the document, “Arte Consultores Externo” appears as the author, the successful bidder.
Arte Consultores is a company based in San Cristóbal de La Laguna that in 2020 exceeded five million euros in turnover, according to the latest available economic data from the firm.
Sources from the Port Authority respond that the specifications for this contest were drawn up by personnel from that body, although they specify that an “advice” was requested to Art Consultants.
That document, admits a spokeswoman for the agency, “served precisely as the basis for the drafting of some aspects of the specifications, which meant dragging the metadata” where the winning company appeared.
From the Tenerife Authority they insist that this is something allowed by article 70 of the Public Sector Contracts Law, for which “the principles of free concurrence and competition were not violated”.
Something similar happened in the City Council of Fasnia (Tenerife) and around the same time. On September 19 of the same year, the Tenerife council put out to tender a contract entitled “Maintenance services, repair of computer equipment, technical support and consultancy.”
A contest of 31,104 euros to which Three companies showed up: Socassat Facilities and Services, Keycoes Communication and Cibercanarias Computer Services. The first two companies offered to provide the service with offers below the base bidding price, offering 23,040 and 27,293.76 euros, respectively.
Cibercanarias, on the other hand, adjusted to the budget established by the city council and did not make any cancellations, remaining, within the criteria quantifiable by the technicians, worse positioned than its competitors when it came to winning the contract. However, in the technical criteria, it surpassed the rest of the companies and was awarded the tender.
The computer team author of the specifications that directed the contract, in this case, was registered with the commercial name of the winning company: “Cibercanarias”. This newspaper contacted the aforementioned council on several occasions, but They did not clarify what happened with the controversial tender.
Galicia: 40,000 euros
On the other hand, the Local Board of the Cee City Council (La Coruña) put out to tender in February 2020 the project to install a Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) broadcasting station. The contract was won by the company Electrical Construction and Assembly Santos Héctor SL.
The company based in Monforte de Lemos (Lugo) Elecnor was imposed on the Bilbao engineering company despite having offered a substantially more expensive price than the Basques.
The technicians of the A Coruña town hall estimated that the Galician company’s offer was better according to subjective criteria. In the analysis of the metadata of the technical construction specifications of the contract, it can be seen that the computer from which the document was created was registered under the name “Santos Héctor”, with a clear coincidence with the name of the company that was finally awarded. In contact with this newspaper, from the City Council of Cee they have not offered any explanation.
Inspection
The use of metadata is gradually generalizing when seeking to audit public procurement. On February 3, 2021, for example, two parliamentarians from EH Bildu appeared at a notary’s office in Vitoria and were capable of “guessing” that the company Sener Engineering and Systems would win a public tender convened by a public company dependent on the Department of Territorial Planning of the Government of Lakua.
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Their “good luck” was not such: they had had access to the metadata of the specifications of said contractin which the name of the company that was finally awarded the contract already appeared.
Later, said public company defended itself by asserting that said “coincidence” was caused by the reuse of the document from other older ones. Nowthe artificial intelligence is capable of doing this tracking in a massive way.