The Public Contracting Monitoring System (PCMS) is a tool aimed at enabling Chapters and other interested stakeholders. The PCMS goal is to observe and measure public contracting systems and their changes towards or away from an “ideal” contracting system - in terms of transparency, corruption prevention, and control. This distance between the ideal system and the actual situation is defined as corruption risk.

The PCMS consists of 138 indicators. Some indicators measure the existence of legal mandates or certain institutional designs (institutional indicators), some measure actual practices (performance indicators, perception indicators) and some measure aspects related to the context, to the integrity system that are relevant to the public contracting system (context indicators).

This tool was developed within the TILAC Regional Programme for Transparent Public Contracting, a multi level (regional and national) project. The PCMS has been worked out as a two-phase project. In the first phase between April 2004 and April 2005, a pilot test of the indicators was implemented in nine countries. In the second phase the tool was used to assess the country’s compliance to the OAS Anti-bribery Convention, and included applications in nine Latin American Countries encompassing country-wide validations with experts and focus groups. The next application phase currently seeks to apply this tool together with our Chapters in more countries.

A brief description of the PCMS tool:

Results of the PCMS implementation in nine Latin American countries:

http://www.transparency.org/news_room/in_focus/procurement_americas

Download the regional report

List of Indicators (XLS) (en español)