Why people look at this
Splitting one purchase into several smaller ones to stay under a limit is the classic way around a tender rule.
How it is worked out
- Town of Paradise: invoices from the same vendor, paid on the same date, with the same description (ignoring numbers and punctuation), each under the town's $139,000 open-call threshold for goods and services and together over it.
- Federal contracts: two or more contracts from the same department to the same vendor within 7 days, with the same description, each under $25,000 and together $25,000 or more. Call-ups against a standing offer are left out, since a standing offer is meant to be drawn on many times, and so are vendors printed as a person's name.
Data used
What it cannot tell you
Monthly bills, separate jobs and separate sites are often paid on the same day. The register does not say whether invoices were for one piece of work.
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.