External project identifier

[practicalparticipation]

From Nepal and Mexico field missions:

"In our analysis, we worked to link tenders and awards with specific donor-funded projects. We were only able to make this connection for a small percentage of contracts. But donors, civil society and other are keen to understand how development funds are used by government agencies to accomplish distinct development goals. If tenders or awards are funded by a donor project, this should be clearly listed in a unique field."

This suggests demand for a 'related project ID'.

Use cases suggest the main requirement for this is at the Contracting Process level, so it could sit within the header of a release/record.

Using our current id block could be adapted for this.

Worked example (fictional)

A Contracting Process is taking place to deliver a project which is funded by an aid donor. Through the International Aid Transparency Initiative it has an identifier of 'GB-3-ABC-MEX-000065'. The project is also listed in a government register of major projects with ID 'ABC12563'

{
    "ocid": "abckskgjejslgha-12312521234",
    "relatedID": [
       { 
           "scheme": "http://iatistandard.org/activity-standard/overview/iati-identifier/",
           "id":"GB-3-ABC-MEX-000065",
           "relationship":"fundingProject"
       },
       { 
           "scheme": "http://mexico.gov/major-projects/",
           "id":"ABC12563",
           "relationship":"parentProject"
       },
    ]
}

Learning/questions from the worked example:

• Do we need the relationship field (we would need to define an initial list of relationship types here), or can this be inferred from the scheme of the relatedID?
• Should scheme be a URI? Or a codelist value?

[practicalparticipation]

Note - an important relationship may be 'subContract' to relate across OCDS files.

[LindseyAM]

I dont think this is the right place to talk about the subcontracting issue. Linking to a project (whether donor or budget project) is one issue. A different issue would be to add fields to the implementation stage that captures the identifier of each subcontractor and description of each subcontract (which would be minimum basic info on subcontracts).

[practicalparticipation]

@LindseyAM Do we have any examples of publishers already providing subcontract information that this could be based upon?

This would require a new block of fields in the approach you suggest, so we would need to make sure we had a good model to base this on.

[LindseyAM]

Hi Tim @practicalparticipation

Ok 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).

[jpmckinney]

Btw, the Sunlight Foundation has done a lot of work with the data from usaspending.gov, in case their experience is of use.

[practicalparticipation]

Subcontracting discussion moved to #144.

However, logging in this thread that a type of relatedID we may want to have is:

• previousOCID or
• otherKnownOCIDs

As in working through documentation tasks for OCID I can see there are circumstances in which a republisher might wish to mint an OCID for a contract, but then the original publisher assigns the Contracting Process a different OCID.

In these cases, the ideal behaviour would be for the re-publisher to switch to using the original publishers OCID, and to log the previous one under 'previousOCID'.

However, I can also envisage they might be resistant to this due to not wanting to change their main IDs for things, hence also raising alternative of 'otherKnownOCIDs'

[LindseyAM]

@marcelarozo may have thoughts.

[jpmckinney]

FYI, CoST has "Project name" field. No ID, just a name for the project.

[jpmckinney]

I'm not clear on how the commit solves this issue. Re-opening.

[timgdavies]

Between relatedProcess (#371) and the budget level ability to refer to an external project (#378) this issue should be addressed.