Mission

Promote the use of Integrity Pacts to oversee tenders and contracting in Colombia

Activities

Transparencia por Colombia (TpC)– Transparency International’s chapter in that country – was the leading TI chapter to pilot the use of Integrity Pacts at a large scale. After conducting a comprehensive review of corruption risks in public procurement, TpC launched a strategy in May 1999 to promote the use of Integrity Pacts to oversee tenders and contracting. By 2008, TpC had served as the civil society monitor for 62 Integrity Pacts applied to 85 tenders with a total value of USD 3.200 million. These IPs covered diverse sectors including: health, infrastructure, defense, education, finance, energy, housing, communications, transport and others.

In the following decade, TpC placed less of an emphasis on the promotion of Integrity Pacts. During Colombian President Manuel Santos’s tenure (2010 – 2018), various levels of the Colombian government piloted additional integrity tools to oversee public procurement, including the High-Level Reporting Mechanism (HLRM). A major roads infrastructure tender in 2015 used an Integrity Pact for bidders to sign with integrity and anti-corruption commitments, with the HLRM structure serving as the external monitor and adjudicatory body.

More recently, the Colombian Secretary of Transparency has introduced the concept of “Transparency and Integrity Pacts” for the private sector. Despite the similarity in names, the more recent pacts are quite different from traditional Integrity Pacts as they are unrelated to procurement and are rather sectoral Collective Action initiatives. In 2019, TpC said that is not currently promoting Integrity Pacts in Colombia as they are resource intensive and it is prioritising other integrity tools for procurement instead.