Red Flags — Hungary's Civil-Society Tool Scoring EU Tenders on 40 Corruption-Risk Indicators

Red Flags was created in 2015 by K-Monitor, PetaByte and Transparency International Hungary with a European Commission grant. Development took about two years and the budget was about €130,000, half of it for IT. It checks the EU's Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) every day; the team chose TED over the Hungarian national portal because the latter changed often.
There are 40 indicators: 31 for contract notices and 9 for award notices, derived from focus groups of lawyers, practitioners and prosecutors. Red flags come from features of the procedure itself, such as a large framework agreement (above roughly €4.2M for works or €2.8M for goods and services) or fewer than three tenders; pink flags add context such as the authority's past convictions or cartel risk. The Commission's description lists predefined indicators and does not say machine learning is used, so this is algorithmic decision support rather than a learned model.
About 20 people check the tool daily and 700–800 users are registered; a five-person team maintains it at roughly €1,000 a year. Several fraud cases were detected and reported in the media, but none led to investigations and procurement procedures were not changed. Government agencies, prosecutors and police do not use it.
Limits are stated openly: it does not monitor contract performance, TED thresholds exclude many contracts, it has no access to company registers, tax data or politically exposed persons lists, and 'risky does not mean corrupt'. Separately, Hungary's single-bid share in national procedures fell from 24.8% to 11.7% between 2021 and 2023 according to the Competition Authority (GVH), but no causal link to this tool is claimed.

Read the full analysis: https://www.redflags.eu