Investigation guide

What is PeBaniiNostri.ro?

PeBaniiNostri.ro automatically checks every public purchase in Romania (tender, direct purchase or offline purchase) against 10 risk indicators, using the open data from data.gov.ro.

Three rules before anything else

1. A flagged case is a reason to look, not proof. The indicators find statistical anomalies. The explanation may be perfectly legal, so every case has to be checked in context.
2. Read the unit. Each indicator counts something different: a group of purchases, a purchase, a company, an authority–supplier pair, a lot, an authority, an authority-year or a market. Never add up the cases or the money of two indicators.
3. Every figure can be checked. The last column of an indicator's table opens the purchases the case was computed from, and each purchase's SICAP number opens its record on e-licitatie.ro.

1Where to start

An investigation usually starts in one of three places: a name you already have, an indicator that found something, or an area you want to understand.

2How to investigate a contracting authority

1. Open the authority's profile, from the search or from the authority list. The first figures show how much it spent in each stream: direct purchases, offline purchases and tenders.
2. Read the three scores (single-bidder rate, discretionary spend index and supplier concentration) beside the national reference and the authority's rank. A score only matters if it is high against the other authorities.
3. Go through the strip of nine indicators. A lit indicator opens its cases, already filtered to the authority. Several indicators lit in the same year or at the same supplier say more than one alone.
4. Look at the charts by year and by CPV code. A sudden jump in one year, or large spending in a field unrelated to what the authority does, are good questions for later.
5. In the supplier table, read each supplier's share and the stream it was paid through. A supplier taking a large share of the money through direct purchases alone is worth comparing with indicators #01 and #02. Every amount in the table opens the purchases it was summed from.
6. Finish with the latest purchases and the full lists under Acquisitions, filtered to the authority: that is where each purchase's description, value and SICAP number are.

3How to investigate a supplier

1. Open the company's profile, from the search or from the supplier list. The header shows the registration date and, if indicator #03 flags the company, how many days passed before its first public money.
2. Read the three scores (money won without competition, money won at exactly the estimated value, and dependence on the main client), each beside the national reference. Below a minimum number of lots or clients the score is missing, because it would say nothing.
3. Look at the clients: each one's share of the company's revenue (how much the company depends on it) and of the authority's spending (how much the authority depends on the company). A pair where both shares are high is a relationship to follow over time.
4. Check the association partners, the companies that won the same contracts together. The same partners returning to the same authorities may point to a shared-out market.
5. Put the revenue-by-year chart beside the company's history in the trade registry: shareholders, directors, seat, headcount, balance sheets. A jump in revenue right after a change of shareholders is a question to ask.
6. For a new company, read its first year's balance sheet. A company with no staff and no assets carrying out millions of lei of works in its first months has probably subcontracted the work, and that shows in the award documentation.

4Reading the indicators in context

Every indicator page is built the same way. Before the cases, read four things:

• The unit of a case: what the indicator counts (a group of purchases, a lot, a pair, a market, an authority-year).
• The threshold: the value from which a case is flagged. The thresholds are set from the national distribution and described in the methodology panel, under the headline figures.
• The rate by year: the chart shows the cases and their share of everything that was checked. A year with many cases may just be a year with many purchases; the rate says whether the pattern grew.
• What it does not cover: every methodology ends with the method's limits. Read them before writing about a case.

The indicators are best read together. A new company (#03) winning a single-offer lot (#05), at exactly the estimated value (#07), from an authority it depends on (#04), makes a pattern no indicator sees alone. The dashboard shows who is flagged by several indicators at once.

5From flagged case to finding

A flagged case is only the start. The steps below separate an explainable anomaly from a story.

1. Redo the arithmetic. Open the purchases behind the case (the table's last column) and check their number, values and dates. If something does not match, settle the figures first.
2. Read the source. The SICAP number opens each purchase on e-licitatie.ro: the full description, the notices and, for tenders, the award documentation, the clarifications and the outcome of the procedure.
3. Compare. Put the case beside the national reference, beside the same authority in other years and beside other authorities buying the same CPV code (CPV statistics). A 60% single-bidder rate in a market where the average is 55% is not a story.
4. Rule out the innocent explanations. Check the usual explanations listed below first. Every one you can rule out makes the case stronger.
5. Ask for the documents. The procurement file (dosarul achiziției publice) is a public document. You can request it from the authority under Law 544/2001, together with the needs assessment and the document that justifies the estimated value.
6. Connect the people. The trade registry shows the company's shareholders and directors, and the asset and interest declarations of the authority's management are public. A link between them turns a pattern into a question of public interest.
7. Give a right of reply. Send your questions to the authority and the company before publishing, and quote the answer. Write "flagged by indicator #05", not "fraud": the figures here describe purchases, not intentions.

Read the methodology

6With an AI assistant

PeBaniiNostri.ro has an MCP server. You connect it to Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Cursor or Gemini, and the assistant reads the same data and the same indicators as the site, through the same operations. Connecting takes a minute and is described on the AI assistant page.

What it helps with

• Triage. Ask about a county, a field or a kind of authority and get, within minutes, the list of those worth a look, with each one's indicators.
• Chaining. The assistant finds the CUI, the CPV code or the county code itself and moves from a profile to an indicator's cases, then to the purchases behind them, without you knowing what each filter is called.
• Searching in your own words. "Laptops bought by schools in Iași in 2025" becomes a search by CPV code, county and year, and the results are compared on the spot: prices, suppliers, periods.
• Summing up. At the end, ask for a table of what you found: each finding, its figure, the indicator and the link to the page where you can check it.

An investigation, step by step

An example conversation. Each question builds on the previous answer; under it, the tools the assistant usually calls.

1. „Which authorities in Vaslui county spent more than 10 million lei and are flagged by at least three indicators?”

   Tools used: get_reference_valueslist_authorities

2. „Take the first one. Read its profile and tell me which scores stand out against the national reference.”

   Tools used: get_authority_profile

3. „Show me its lots awarded on a single offer, over the whole period, largest first, with the winners.”

   Tools used: find_single_bidder_lots

4. „Does the winner of the largest lot also appear among its direct-purchase suppliers? What share of the company's revenue comes from this authority?”

   Tools used: get_supplier_profilesearch_purchases

5. „Make me a table of everything we found: the finding, the figure, the indicator and the link to the page where I can check it.”

How to use it without being misled

• The figures are ours, the conclusions are its own. The assistant can misread a table or draw a conclusion the data does not support. Open the link of every figure you use.
• Ask it to look up, not to remember. A CUI, an amount or a company name given without a tool call is a guess. Ask it to check it in the data.
• Name the period. "In 2024" and "over the whole period" are different questions. For #05, #09 and #10 the whole period is a separate test, not the sum of the years.
• Do not let it add indicators up. A lot, a pair and a market do not add up. A "total flagged money" across several indicators means nothing.
• It only knows what is in the data. It does not read specifications, contracts or the trade registry. The documents and the people remain your part of the investigation.
• It has a daily budget. Every tool call is charged to your account's budget, the same as the API's. A whole profile costs a single call.

Connecting it, every tool and more examples