ASSAYSYSTEMS
The federal contract register counts every amendment as a contract.
Found 3 September 2026, published 4 September 2026, figures restated 5 September 2026 · Assay Systems, Ottawa · Source: Proactive Disclosure — Contracts over $10,000, Government of Canada open data, 1,313,540 rows as downloaded 2 September 2026.
The published rows sum to $1.23 trillion. Collapsed to one contract per award, they come to $0.61 trillion. Anyone who sums the rows doubles the market.
The Government of Canada publishes every contract over $10,000 as open data. A contract enters the register once when it is signed. Each time it is amended, a new row is published, and that row carries the whole value of the contract after the amendment, not the amount added by it. Nothing in the dataset documentation says that these rows should be excluded from a sum, and no field carries the increment alone.
The scale
| rows | value | |
|---|---|---|
| Rows as published | 1,313,540 | $1,232,280,189,662 |
| Distinct contracts, last published value each | 1,139,609 | $609,083,183,336 |
| Difference | 173,931 | $623,197,006,326 |
The sum of the rows overstates the real total by 102 percent; 51 percent of the summed value is the same money counted more than once. Under the most generous reading of the data, described under Method below, the overstatement is 97 percent. A contract amended many times is counted many times, so the distortion is largest where the money is largest.
One contract, four rows
A contract signed by ADGA Group Consultants on 5 October 2011 appears in the register four times.
| reference number | original value | contract value | type |
|---|---|---|---|
| C-2011-2012-Q3-00174 | — | $102,475,631 | (none) |
| C-2021-2022-Q2-00002 | $102,475,631 | $318,780,411 | C |
| C-2021-2022-Q2-03448 | $102,475,631 | $318,780,411 | A |
| C-2022-2023-Q2-03827 | $102,475,631 | $348,625,938 | A |
Added together, the four rows come to $1,088,662,391. The contract is worth $348,625,938, the value in its last published row. Every intermediate row is a snapshot of the same contract at an earlier date. A third defect sits in the same four rows: the 2011 row names the supplier as ADGA Group Consultants Inc., the three later rows as ADGA Group Counsultants Inc. The rule below collapses the three later rows to one; the 2011 row stands apart on its spelling, so the collapsed register still carries $451,101,569 for this one contract.
A second defect underneath the first
For part of the register the contract date field holds the date of the amendment rather than the date of the award. A sum by year moves money into the year it was amended, not the year it was won.
Method
Rows are grouped by supplier name, contracting department, start of the period of work, with the contract date where the start is blank, and original value. A row that carries no original value joins the group whose original value equals its own contract value when such a group exists, and otherwise stands as published; 310,287 rows stand that way. Within each group the last published row, by reference number, is kept. The figures above are reproducible from the public CSV with that rule and nothing else. Two choices inside the rule move the total, both toward a smaller overstatement, and both are bounded. Keeping the highest published value instead of the last raises the collapsed total by 1.2 percent, to $616,132,651,052. Where a department signs several contracts with one supplier on one start date at one original value, the rule cannot tell them apart and keeps one; that happens in 13,414 groups and hides at most $8,261,219,058. With both applied the collapsed total is $624,393,870,110 and the overstatement is 97 percent.
What this means
Anyone who has summed this dataset has been working with a figure double the truth. That includes newsrooms, researchers and suppliers sizing their own market. Every figure in an Assay Systems extract is computed on the collapsed register, one contract per award.
The full finding, with the reference number of every row cited, is published under the name of the founder: dzyuban.com/business/register-amendments.
Reporters and researchers: write to [email protected]. Assay Systems will provide the finding in full in writing, with the collapsed dataset for any supplier or department you name.