The Principles on Commercial Transparency in Public Contracts
- Jan 2019
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- International
Open contracting is centered on the idea that government contracts should be proactively published in a form that makes the information in those contracts easily available to firms and citizens. Such regimes have proven to be a powerful tool to improve procurement outcomes and expose poor contracting practices. But there are cases in which full publication of all the information in government contracts can be against public interest. The Centre for Global Development (CGD) brought together individual experts with experience in business, government agencies and civil society to try and build a consensus around a set of principles regarding when contract information might justifiably be redacted on the grounds of commercial confidentiality and how the redaction process should work. This report presents 10 principles that are built on a key concept: information should be kept confidential on the grounds of commercial sensitivity only when it is in the public interest to do so.
