The $16 billion year: what the Procurement Regulator could not count

The Office of Procurement Regulation laid its third annual report in Parliament on 11 September 2026. The headline is a number: public bodies in Trinidad and Tobago reported awarding some $16.0 billion in contracts across 141,479 transactions in the financial year 2024/2025, up from $13.7 billion across 105,299 awards the year before.[1]

The more important number is buried further in. In no quarter of that year did the proportion of public bodies filing the returns the law requires rise above 63.8 per cent.[2]

The $16 billion, then, is not a total. It is the portion of national procurement that the State managed to write down. More than a third of the bodies obliged to report did not report, in a system whose entire purpose is to make public spending visible. The Regulator's own description of the sum as a conservative 9.2 per cent of gross domestic product is an acknowledgement that the true share of the economy passing through public contracts is higher, by an amount nobody can state.

Around $3 billion of what was reported is recorded as awarded but unfulfilled.[3] The published summary does not break that figure down by agency or by contract. Three billion dollars of committed public money sits against no named project in the public record.

The Regulator also records poor data quality, suspected duplicate entries, and awards submitted with no reference to the Annual Schedule of Planned Procurement Activities — the document that is supposed to establish that a purchase was planned before it was made. Roughly a third of awards carried no such reference.[4] A contract that cannot be traced back to a plan cannot be tested against one.

By value, the largest awarding bodies were National Petroleum, the Water and Sewerage Authority and Heritage Petroleum.[5] These are the state enterprises whose accounts reach the Public Accounts (Enterprises) Committee years after the money is spent: the Committee's recent reports have examined enterprise accounts from 2015 to 2019. An oversight system running most of a decade behind the transactions it examines is not oversight in any sense a contractor would recognise.

The report does not allege wrongdoing in any particular contract, and neither do I. What it shows is that the country does not know, to within several billion dollars, what it has agreed to buy.

Each gap could be closed under the existing law. Quarterly returns could be published by public body, so that the agencies failing to file are named. The unfulfilled-contract figure could be broken down. The planning-schedule reference could be made a condition of payment.

For the third year running, the Regulator has written that public bodies treat procurement reform as paperwork. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Finance, asked on Friday whether it would require agencies to file, said the matter was “under review.”