Why people look at this
One sole-source award can be the only sensible choice. A long run of them to the same company is the pattern auditors ask about, because it can mean a supplier never faces competition.
How it is worked out
- Provincial awards citing the only-one-source clause, 6(a)(v).
- Grouped by public body and supplier (supplier names normalised for spelling and legal suffixes).
- Flagged when a pair has three or more such awards across the reports from 2021 on.
Data used
What it cannot tell you
Software licences, maintenance of installed equipment and parts for existing machines are often genuinely single-source. The flag cannot tell those from anything else.
The Open Contracting Partnership's guide to red flags puts it this way: a red flag is not evidence that anything wrong happened. It points at something that may be worth a closer look.
This page and the calculation are generated from one definition, so they cannot drift apart. See the results.