Community detection in Slovene public spending

Abstract

Government public spending is a very complicated system with many different endpoints as government funding has to be distributed to a large number of institutions which purchase goods and services using public funds from a large number of other public and private organizations. Even though there are mechanisms in place which control public spending by either entrusting control to a public institution or by giving them legal procedures they must follow in order to purchase a service, the procedures are sometimes unreliable or enable exploitation. These procedures often include public tenders and procurements which can often be exploited by the bidding private firms or public servants. We hypothesise that there are patterns in such behaviour which could perhaps be extracted by discovering communities in the transaction network connecting individuals by examining publicly available transaction data of public funds.