SIGMA brings public procurement under citizen oversight with one click

A few days ago, the Bulgarian government presented a free public tool that provides access to information about the spending of public funds through public procurement. Developed in less than a month by employees of the Ministry of Innovation and Digital Transformation with the assistance of artificial intelligence, sigma.midt.bg has been open source since its launch and contains data on 193,000 contracts worth more than EUR 51 billion.

Prime Minister Rumen Radev said the government’s aim is to put an end to scandalous public procurement practices and hidden intra-agency transfers which are causing particularly significant damage to the budget. All ministries, agencies and local authorities should be aware that the Integrated Civil Monitoring and Analysis System (SIGMA) will be rapidly expanded and will enable automated checks for links between related parties, favoured companies and inflated prices in public procurement procedures, Rumen Radev said at the start of the Council of Ministers meeting on June 17.

“This is a success for civil society”, Yassen Tanev of the Bulgarian Association for Business Software Development told Bulgarian National Radio (BNR). “It was a great pleasure for me to see how something that began more than five years ago as an initiative by motivated enthusiasts was later supported by a team of experts within the public administration and then taken up as a commitment by the National Assembly, which passed legislation enabling the data to be published in an easily readable and open public procurement standard used across Europe. And finally, perhaps for the first time in Bulgaria, I see a ministry saying: ‘We do not need to create the perfect system. We need to make the data visible to citizens, provide them with open data and open-source code, and invite them to work with us.’ That is how innovation happens, and that is the path to digital transformation”, said Yassen Tanev. 

The SIGMA system serves as a platform for transparency and civic oversight of public procurement. Its main strength lies in its accessibility. It enables users to monitor how public funds are spent without the need for specialised technical expertise in handling databases. Using an intuitive interface, any citizen can search for information by sector, region or specific company, while the system helps identify related parties and potentially inflated prices. In this way, SIGMA makes it possible to shed light on public finances in real time, acting as a safeguard against corrupt practices. Yasen Tanev also provided examples of how the system can be used and further enhanced:

“As people working in the IT sector, we can see what is happening in areas such as cybersecurity, licensing and cloud services. Everyone can check what is happening in their own village — whether there is funding, who received it and how it was spent. This is the first step towards becoming an analyst of public spending with just a few clicks. Open-source code allows anyone to propose additional modules. For example, an artificial intelligence system or a skilled programmer could create a module for mapping connections, calculating average costs, or tracking trends showing which companies are carrying out contracts in which regions, for example in the water infrastructure sector. When you create something useful, you simply contribute it back to the system. I will examine cybersecurity contracts. I imagine each of us “adopting” a sector or a public procurement contract, analysing the data from an expert perspective and making the information publicly available. The ministry is saying: ‘You have the sandbox — come and play, so that we can turn data into information'.”

Drawing on his experience as a lecturer at the Institute of Public Administration, Yassen Tanev stressed that Bulgaria’s public administration has great potential when it sees that it is empowered to communicate and work with citizens. “What the administration needs at the moment is to feel the support and the impact of working together with society. And I believe that perhaps this is the wave that needs to continue clearing away what is dirty and leaving things clean behind”, Yassen Tanev told Diana Yankulova on Bulgarian National Radio’s Horizont channel.

Interview by Diana Yankulova

Translated by Kostadin Atanasov