FOPPA: an open database of French public procurement award notices from 2010–2020

• Published in: Scientific data Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 303
• Main Authors: Potin, Lucas, Labatut, Vincent, Morand, Pierre-Henri, Largeron, Christine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 19-05-2023; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 706/689/159; 706/689/2788; Automation; Computer Science; Data Descriptor; Data Structures and Algorithms; Government purchasing; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Database; Public procurement Public open data Fraud detection; Public open data; Data mining; Fraud detection; Public procurement
• ISSN: 2052-4463; 2052-4463
• DOI: 10.1038/s41597-023-02213-z

Public Procurement
refers to governments’ purchasing activities of goods, services, and construction of public works. In the European Union (EU), it is an essential sector, corresponding to 15% of the GDP. EU public procurement generates large amounts of data, because award notices related to contracts exceeding a predefined threshold must be published on the TED (EU’s official journal). Under the framework of the DeCoMaP project, which aims at leveraging such data in order to predict fraud in public procurement, we constitute the FOPPA (French Open Public Procurement Award notices) database. It contains the description of 1,380,965 lots obtained from the TED, covering the 2010–2020 period for France. We detect a number of substantial issues in these data, and propose a set of automated and semi-automated methods to solve them and produce a usable database. It can be leveraged to study public procurement in an academic setting, but also to facilitate the monitoring of public policies, and to improve the quality of the data offered to buyers and suppliers.