Methodology and Data Reconciliation Rules

Technical specifications and mathematical definitions governing how Canadian Disclosure ingests, standardizes, and analyzes Government of Canada proactive disclosure records.

Core procurement distinction: Contract figures reflect total award commitment values (original award plus amendments), not amounts actually paid. The Government of Canada does not disclose actual expenditures per contract.

1. Fiscal Year Calculation

The Government of Canada operates on an April 1 to March 31 fiscal year. Every record is assigned a fiscal year according to its operational disclosure date:

Contracts: contract_date (the contract award or execution date).
Grants and Contributions: agreement_start_date.
Travel and Hospitality: disclosure_group quarter mapping or start date.
Position Reclassifications: effective_date.

For any date between April 1 of year Y and March 31 of year Y+1, the fiscal year identifier is formatted as Y-(Y+1 mod 100) (for example, 2024-04-01 through 2025-03-31 is fiscal year 2024-25).

2. Entity Resolution and Deduplication Engine

In government disclosure releases, vendor names are recorded manually across dozens of departments, resulting in severe fragmentation. A single vendor may appear under dozens of variations (for example: "Engineers in Motion Inc.", "Engineers in Motion", "ENGINEERS IN MOTION INC").

Our entity resolution engine applies a deterministic two-tier matching strategy:

Business Number (BN) Matching: Canada Revenue Agency 9-digit Business Numbers are extracted and validated via Luhn checksum. Identical BNs resolve directly to the same canonical entity.
Normalized String Matching: Suffixes (Inc., Ltd., LLC, Corp., Limitée), punctuation, accents, and corporate divisions are stripped. Cleaned legal title tokens are matched. High-confidence string matches (Jaro-Winkler distance > 0.92) are queued for review.

3. Statistics Canada CPI Inflation Adjustments

To enable meaningful historical comparisons across years, nominal contract values are adjusted to constant 2025 Canadian dollars using Statistics Canada Consumer Price Index (CPI) annual averages (Table 18-10-0004-01):

CPI Adjusted Value = Nominal Value * (CPI_2025 / CPI_Year)

Deflators used: 2019-20 (1.2094), 2020-21 (1.2006), 2021-22 (1.1609), 2022-23 (1.0868), 2023-24 (1.0462), 2024-25 (1.0198), 2025-26 (1.0000).

4. Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) Concentration

Supplier market concentration is measured using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), calculated as the sum of squared market shares for all contractors within a department in a fiscal year:

HHI = sum( (s_i * 100)^2 ) where s_i = (vendor_spend / total_department_spend)

HHI under 1,500: Unconcentrated market (competitive supplier base).
HHI 1,500 to 2,500: Moderately concentrated market.
HHI above 2,500: Highly concentrated market (dominated by few major contractors).

5. Contract Amendments and Reconciliation

When a contract is amended, the government publishes an amendment record containing the revised total value. Canadian Disclosure reconciles original and amendment records to compute:

Current Value: The latest active contract commitment value.
Original Value: The value prior to subsequent amendments.
Amendment Growth: The percentage increase between original and current values.