CMA trials AI tool to combat bid-rigging

Could save the public sector 'billions'

The UK’s competition regulator is trialling an AI system to identify and stop bid-rigging.

Sarah Cardell, head of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), told the Financial Times the UK faces a “significant risk of bid-rigging" by contractors bidding for public contracts.

Bid-rigging is a practice where companies collude to affect the outcome of a public tender – either by determining the winner in advance or agreeing to fix a price.

The CMA’s new system uses artificial intelligence to scrape data at a massive scale. It believes the tool could help catch companies that work together in this way.

Cardell told the FT, “We’ve now got the capability to be able to scan...bidding data at scale, to spot anomalies in that bidding data, and to identify areas of potential anti-competitive conduct."

A pilot programme with one government department is proving “quite successful.”

Public procurement in the UK has come under scrutiny in recent years, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The way public contracts were awarded at that time raised accusations of corruption and even spawned an interactive tool to map links between politicians and contract winners.

More recently, the CMA announced a new probe into bid-rigging among Department for Education suppliers at the end of last year.

A new debarment regime is set to come into effect this year, which will ban firms that have broken competition law from bidding on public contracts.

Cardell said the new AI programme could save the public sector “billions” while also boosting productivity.

We reached out to the CMA for more information on the AI tool, but the regulator had no more to add.