--- title: Bid Rigging and Procurement Collusion Detection url: https://nexyron.tech/industries/procurement-integrity description: Screens that survive a cartel reading the published ones: rotation as a sequence, losing bidders reappearing as subcontractors, and evaluator drift. --- # The losers became the winner's subcontractors *Procurement and grants integrity* Across eleven tenders, in rotation. No screen looks there, because award data and contract data have never been read together. Nexyron reads them as one model. ## Your screens are published. The cartel has read them Too few bidders. Round prices. The same firm winning one region. Bids minutes apart. Cover bids too high to win. Every classic indicator is documented, taught and freely available. A group operating for a decade knows all of them, so the bids arrive from a plausible number of firms at plausible intervals with plausible spreads. > A cartel that allocates work has to actually allocate it. That allocation is in your contract data, and nothing you own reads award data and contract data together. There is a deeper reason the classic screens have stopped working. Every one of them is a statistic computed over bids in a table. Bids are the part of this the participants control most completely, and a table has no way to express a relationship, a sequence, or what happened after the contract was signed. The screen returns nothing, and that is not a failure of the screen. It is what happens when a detection method becomes public and the subject can read. ## Three places the participants are not curating Nexyron builds one model from the tender notices, the bid records, the award decisions, the evaluation scores, the contract performance data, the subcontractor filings and the company register, and then asks it questions a bid table cannot hold. ### The relationships between firms Common officers, shared addresses, shared agents, shared history. A firm controls what its bid looks like far more easily than it controls what the registry says about its directors. In Nexyron that is a traversal, not a manual chart somebody maintains. ### What happens after the award The losing firm has to be compensated, and it usually happens as a subcontractor to the winner. It is sitting in the contract data and nobody joins it to the bids. ### Behaviour over time One tender is close to impossible to judge. Eleven across four years is a pattern with a shape, and time is a property of the model rather than a separate export. The signal moved to where the screens are not, which is exactly the place a connected model can reach and a table cannot. ## A simulated screen Constructed to show the method. No authority, no supplier, no claim about detection performance. 1. **A market that looks competitive** Eight firms, 47 tenders, four years. Participation averages 4.2 bidders, winning margin 6%, no firm above 22% of awards. Every classic screen has been run and every one is clean. 2. **Are these eight firms eight firms** Joined to the company register. Six are unrelated. Two share a director who resigned from one four months before the other was incorporated. It changes the effective number of independent bidders in every tender both entered. 3. **Counted, or in sequence** Counted, the award distribution is unremarkable. In sequence, within one category, the winner rotates through five firms in an order that repeats twice across four years. 4. **Where the losers went** In eight of eleven tenders, at least one losing bidder later appears as a subcontractor, consortium member or supplier to the winner of the same contract. 5. **The evaluator** Most score consistently. One does not. Across seven tenders their scores for one firm drift steadily upward relative to their own scoring of everyone else, while colleagues' scores stay flat. In two of the seven, the technical specification carried requirements only one firm met. 6. **Did the integrity pact work** Three comparable categories did not receive it, so the question is answerable. The direct subcontracting largely stops, and a new pattern appears in which the compensation flows one step further removed. The behaviour did not stop. It adapted, in a way the original screen would never catch. That is the finding that tells you what to do next. ## Four screens nobody currently runs ### Rotation is a sequence, not a count Every conventional concentration measure is a count, which is exactly why sophisticated rotation survives all of them. ### The compensation is visible and unwatched Did the losing bidder work on the contract they lost. Computable today from data most authorities already publish and nobody joins. ### Familiarity has a shape over time Invisible in one tender. Unmistakable across seven, once the evaluator is a subject with a history rather than a column. ### Adaptation is measurable Interventions here are announced, evaluated once, and almost never re-examined for displacement. ## Did the reform work, or did the behaviour move? Integrity pacts, e-procurement mandates, lot-splitting rules, mandatory disclosure. Each is introduced, each is credited with an improvement, and the improvement is almost always measured as a before-and-after on a market that was changing anyway. Nexyron carries 42 causal and decision procedures on the same graph the tenders live in. Comparable categories that did not receive the reform are identified rather than assumed. Uplift is estimated rather than asserted, and where the comparison cannot honestly be built, the engine declines instead of publishing a number that will not survive contest. This is the question every oversight body is asked by its legislature and no procurement analytics product has ever answered. ## Built to be contested *The evidence trail is the product* Findings here become public reports and are challenged by well-resourced parties. That is the design constraint, and Nexyron is built to it. Every conclusion carries the records behind it, the time basis, the transformations applied, and a clear separation between what was measured, what was extracted from a document and what was inferred. The methods underneath, community detection, centrality, shortest path and shared-neighbour weighting, are peer-reviewed with decades of literature behind them. What you hand an investigator is a structure, its evidence, and an explicit account of what the data does not establish. That is what makes it usable when somebody expensive starts arguing with it. ## Bid-level data never leaves the institution For a national audit body this is frequently not a preference but a legal constraint. Procurement records, evaluation records and supplier data may not leave the jurisdiction, which closes most of the analytics market outright. Nexyron installs like an application, starts a full engine on hardware you already own, and grows into a cluster inside your own infrastructure when the caseload demands it. ## One category. One afternoon Take your last completed contract category. List the losing bidders, then read the performance records and count how many went on to work on the contract they lost. Request access: https://nexyron.tech/request ## Other industries - [Insurance fraud](https://nexyron.tech/industries/insurance-fraud): A score judges one claim at a time. Rings are built so that every claim survives that test. - [Financial crime and AML](https://nexyron.tech/industries/financial-crime-aml): Everyone suspects which rule has never produced a filing. Nobody can prove it, so it stays. - [Forensic accounting](https://nexyron.tech/industries/forensic-accounting): An intercompany account that reconciles perfectly can hide the fact that nothing was ever transferred. - [Procurement integrity](https://nexyron.tech/industries/procurement-integrity): Across eleven tenders, in rotation. No screen looks there, because nobody joins award data to contract data. - [Internal audit](https://nexyron.tech/industries/internal-audit): It passes every test you run, because every test you run is a test about the entry. - [Insider risk](https://nexyron.tech/industries/insider-risk): Your identity platform knows who can reach the data. Your behaviour platform knows what they did. - [Asset reliability](https://nexyron.tech/industries/asset-reliability): Your prediction platform is trained on a field your technicians do not fill in. - [Supply chain risk](https://nexyron.tech/industries/supply-chain-risk): Your risk platform can tell you a supplier is risky. It has never seen one of your orders. - [Private equity diligence](https://nexyron.tech/industries/private-equity-diligence): Retention improved after they invested in it. Neither fact establishes that the spend caused it.