A new analysis of official Bahamian government procurement data has revealed that nearly one in four public contracts awarded over the two-year period from December 2023 to December 2025 were secured without an open competitive bidding process, accounting for close to 40% of all public spending captured in the dataset.
Tribune News reviewed the publicly available procurement records to identify patterns in non-competitive contracting, finding that of the 3,881 categorized contracts included in the dataset, 927 – or roughly 23.9% – were awarded through no-bid procedures. The value of these non-competitive contracts reached approximately $233.6 million, out of a total combined contract value of $599.1 million across all tracked awards. Critically, the dataset is incomplete: state-owned enterprises, which have never fulfilled the legal requirement to publish their procurement awards, are entirely excluded from the public records.
Under the 2023 Public Procurement Act, open competitive bidding is enshrined as the standard, mandatory approach for awarding all public sector contracts. The law only permits no-bid awards in a narrow set of limited exceptions: low-value purchases under $100,000, emergency response projects, situations where an initial competitive bidding process failed to produce qualified bids, and cases where only a single supplier can deliver the required goods or services. All non-competitive awards are also legally required to include a formal written justification for bypassing open competition.
The analysis found that non-competitive public spending is heavily concentrated among a small pool of very large contracts, rather than spread across many small permitted awards. The single largest no-bid contract recorded was an $180.2 million award issued by the Ministry of Finance in October 2024 for the Eleuthera Road Improvement Project. Other notable large non-competitive awards include $7.25 million for road infrastructure works on South Andros, $2.82 million for road repairs on Bimini, $2.2 million for renovation works at the Queen Elizabeth Sports Centre National Stadium, and $2.04 million for electrical and lighting upgrades at the Thomas A Robinson Stadium.
In terms of agency spending, the Ministry of Finance accounted for the overwhelming majority of all no-bid spending captured in the records, with the Department of Public Works holding a distant second place for non-competitive contract value. A breakdown of contract sizes confirms the concentration of spending in large no-bid awards: of the 927 non-competitive contracts, 848 fall under the $100,000 threshold explicitly permitted by law, and their combined value totals just $17 million. By contrast, only 80 non-competitive contracts exceed the $100,000 threshold, but these 80 awards make up the vast remainder of total no-bid spending, at more than $216 million. Larger contracts that bypass competitive bidding are required by law to meet strict exception criteria, including urgency, limited market competition, or technical constraints that restrict the pool of available suppliers. However, the public procurement records do not include any documentation of which legal exception was used to justify each large no-bid award.
The 2023 Public Procurement Act mandates that all procurement decisions be fully documented and all contract awards published publicly, to enable independent public scrutiny of how taxpayer money is allocated to private vendors. The absence of justifications for large non-competitive awards and the exclusion of state-owned enterprise procurement from public records fall short of the transparency requirements laid out in the legislation.