From security in Iraq to voting machines in the United States, the private sector's work with the government is taking an increasingly visible role in the lives and finances of Americans. Below are three ways journalists have recently reported on government contracts with private business using computer-assisted reporting.
To investigate the politics behind state government transportation contracts in Wisconsin, reporter Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did a fairly simple analysis of two databases.
For the article, "Transportation contracts jumped 45% in 5 years," Marley compared five years of historical transportation contract data given to him by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation with a campaign contributions database maintained by a local nonprofit. Once he obtained the data, Marley said it took him less than an hour using Microsoft Excel and a Web-based database to make two large discoveries.
First, from the government's contract data, Marley found out that engineering consulting contracts for transportation work leaped 45 percent, to $119.1 million from $82.1 million, over the past five years - several times the rate for all state contracts.
Next, he found that employees of four of the top five recipients of engineering contracts were also some of the largest campaign contributors to state politicians. To compare contributors and contractors, Marley cross-checked state records compiled by a Wisconsin nonpartisan group advocating campaign finance reform, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, against the contracts data.
To find change in government contracts, Marley did a simple percent-change calculation in Excel from the contract totals given to him by the state.
The relationship between the top contributors and contractors was a bit more difficult to crack. Marley began by summing amounts for the contractors. He then plugged in the top contractor names into the nonprofit's Web site, which has a searchable list of donors, to get a feel for how much the top contractors were giving to state officials.
Overall, Marley said the data and the analysis were fairly straightforward. He said obtaining the data from the state also was fairly easy. It took him just two days to receive the Excel file containing the transportation contracts from the DOT with several hundred rows of contract data.
View the article online at www.jsonline.com/news/state/oct04/269824.asp.
War profits
Reporters Joseph Neff and Jay Price of The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer brought the Iraq war close to home by investigating a North Carolina company doing contract work in Iraq. At the same time, their article, "Contractors in Iraq make costs balloon," exposed the private and complicated world of government contracting and subcontracting in Iraq.
The mutilation of several American contractors in Iraq propelled the investigation. Several of the contractors worked for Blackwater USA, a North Carolina company that guards the U.S. ambassador and provides other security details in Iraq.
The authors tracked a string of contracts starting with Jerry Zovko - one of Blackwater's contractors who was killed in Iraq while guarding convoys. They followed the contracts up from Zovko through three other subcontractors and eventually to Halliburton, the prime contractor.
The business of contracting in Iraq is a closed world, Neff said. Many people declined to talk until the articles started running. "If we were reporting from Kuwait or Iraq, it would have been easier."
Such an environment made the database reporting challenging, Neff said. Although U.S. taxpayers ultimately paid Blackwater's bills, all of the subcontracts were hidden from the public eye either because of the confidentiality of the work or because the company was a subcontractor.
The major part of Neff's analysis used a federal contracts database. That database, which Neff obtained from the IRE and NICAR Database Library, gave him a picture of how Blackwater's business with the government grew since 1999 - before the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He analyzed the data using FoxPro relational database manager.
Neff used the contractor name field to select Blackwater contracts and tally how much its business had grown with the government to $19 million in 2003 from $205,000 in 2000. He also used the database to obtain contract numbers and make Freedom of Information Act requests for related documents.
However, the database provided only a partial picture of Blackwater's relationship with the government because it did not include any subcontracts the company had received.
The Blackwater contract that Neff and Price were looking into was a subcontract with Halliburton, so they had to seek out other sources. Getting information from Halliburton wasn't feasible. Halliburton had failed to document almost half of a $4 billion invoice it submitted to the Pentagon, according to a recent audit by the Defense Contract Audit Agency. The missing half included the Blackwater contract.
So the reporters relied on other sources and unraveled four layers of contracts above the original Zovko contract. At each layer, the reporters found tacked-on profit margins hidden from the public. They found Blackwater marked up the Zovko contract by 36 percent. However, the other markups went undiscovered. The reporters said "whether the cost for Zovko doubled, tripled or quadrupled" remains unclear as Halliburton has refused to disclose the details of the spending.
Read the article online at www.newsobserver.com/nationworld/blackwater/story/1762376p-8044834c.html.
For more information about the Federal Procurement Data System and ordering options, visit the IRE Web site at www.ire.org/datalibrary/databases/fedcontacts.
Defense dollars
In "Outsourcing the Pentagon," Larry Makinson and a team of reporters and analysts at The Center for Public Integrity completed what is perhaps one of the most thorough CAR analyses of the Department of Defense's private contracts.
The investigative team of about 20 journalists used database reporting to discover the Department of Defense has outsourced about half its budget since 1998. In addition, they found about 40 percent of the department's contracts were awarded without competitive bidding during the same time period.
The basis of their analysis was the Pentagon's procurement database that they described as "public information that had been posted for years on an obscure Defense Department Web site."
Aron Pilhofer, database editor for the Center (and former Campaign Finance Information Center director for IRE), said the Center used the procurement, Federal Election Commission campaign contribution and a lobbying databases for comparison.
The Center downloaded five years of contracting data in text format from the Defense Department Web site (www.dior.whs.mil/PEIDHOME/guide/procoper.htm), which houses data on contracts issues since 1966.
The Center then imported the files from the department's Web site into a Microsoft SQL Server database manager. The Center focused on the contractors with $100 million or more in Defense of Department contracts.
However, the information in the database was far from perfect and required substantial cleaning, according to information posted on the Center's Web site.
"We discovered very early that the Department of Defense database was rife with errors - that literally thousands of records had incorrect or outdated IDs for the contractor's ultimate parent," the Center reported.
To mitigate the errors, the Center examined contracts for companies below the $100 million threshold to make sure that did not miss any company due to possible miscoding.
The Center eventually found more than 700 businesses that had $100 million contracts or more with the Pentagon.
After identifying the major contractors, the reporters researched campaign contributions to Congress and the president. For that, they analyzed the FEC campaign contribution database and lobbying reports filed with the U.S. Senate's Office of Public Records.
They said that the lobbying data online is searchable, but hard to use, so they scraped the data from the Web site using Perl into their own database. (Web scraping is using programming languages to gather data from Web sites and assemble it into database form).
In the end, they found that many of the top contractors were also generous political contributors, especially to President Bush, who was the top recipient of the contractors' contributions, receiving $5.4 million from the top contributors since 1998.
Read the Center's stories at www.publicintegrity.org. Contact Catherine Rentz Pernot by e-mail at Catherine@ire.org.