Two out of every three contracts currently held in LuxIA’s SECOP II database were awarded without a single competitor being able to challenge the winning bid. Of the 388,202 contracts live on the platform, signed between 2023 and July 2026, 251,669 — that is 64.8% — were direct contracting. Open tender, the method the law conceives as the general rule, appears in just 2,073 procurement records: 0.53% of the total.
Article 2 of Colombia’s Law 1150 of 2007 leaves no room for doubt about the hierarchy lawmakers intended: “the contractor shall be selected, as a general rule, through open tender,” and direct contracting “shall proceed only” in the fifteen exhaustively listed circumstances that the same statute enumerates — manifest urgency, inter-administrative contracts, scientific and technological activities, professional services that can only be entrusted to one specific person, and the lease or purchase of real estate, among others. In the data LuxIA manages, that legal hierarchy appears inverted in practice: what the law treats as a narrowly defined exception is, by volume of procurement records, the real engine of Colombian public procurement.
The money, however, does not follow direct contracting in the same proportion. Of the COP 67.25 trillion that the 388,202 contracts add up to, direct contracting accounts for COP 23.66 trillion — 35.2% — with an average ticket of COP 94 million. Open tender, with only 2,073 procurement records, moves COP 16.34 trillion — 24.3% of total value — at an average of COP 7,886 million per contract: 83 times the average size of a direct contract. The reading is consistent: higher-value public works and purchases still mostly pass through the most demanding competitive filter; the sheer volume of direct contracting is explained by the accumulation of thousands of smaller everyday purchases, one legal ground at a time.
A further slice of the picture corresponds to special-regime entities — public utilities, public universities and health insurers, among others — which, on the basis of Law 142 of 1994, Law 30 of 1992 or Law 100 of 1993, contract under private law and outside the methods of the General Procurement Statute. Those entities account for 81,662 contracts — 21% of the total — worth COP 9.6 trillion: a legally distinct universe from direct contracting proper, but one that contributes to open tender remaining, in volume terms, a minority phenomenon within the public procurement system.
That direct contracting dominates the count does not, on its own, amount to an irregularity: each procurement record requires a specific legal ground, a reasoned administrative act and — as Colombia’s National Public Procurement Agency specified in opinion C-1437 of 2025 — preliminary studies that expressly justify “the method or contract type chosen” against the other available alternatives. The duty to give reasons is not a formality: in practice it is the only ex ante control that keeps the absence of competition from turning into arbitrariness. That is why LuxIA’s risk score does not penalise direct contracting as such, but its associated symptoms — supplier concentration, splitting of the contract object, repeat awards — which do reveal when the method was used to avoid a plurality of bidders rather than to respond to a genuine legal ground.
Colombia’s 2026 electoral calendar offers a natural experiment on how much weight that method carries in the day-to-day operation of the state. The Office of the Comptroller General revealed that in January 2026 alone — the last month before the Electoral Guarantees Law froze direct contracting nationwide — Colombian public entities signed 521,269 direct contracts worth COP 32.88 trillion: 64.5% more contracts and 75.1% more value than in January 2022, the equivalent month of the previous electoral cycle. The concentration was such that COP 5.7 trillion was committed on 30 January alone. In LuxIA’s database that same effect shows up in reverse for the full year: whereas in 2023, 2024 and 2025 direct contracting represented between 74% and 78% of the contracts signed each year, in 2026 — with most of the year already under the restriction in article 33 of Law 996 of 2005 — that share falls to 52%, because during the frozen months entities have no choice but to run open tenders, abbreviated selections or merit competitions for what they previously resolved through direct contracting.
That contrast — the January spike against the drop across the rest of the year — is exactly the kind of pattern a single-entity dashboard cannot show, but that a cross-cutting database on SECOP II does reveal: whether a given entity’s mix of methods looks like the system as a whole at that point in the electoral cycle, or departs from it enough to deserve a question. That is the concrete value of looking at public procurement with aggregated, verifiable data: it does not replace the legal analysis of each individual procurement record, but it tells the oversight group, the supplier or the journalist where to look first.