Assay record ASY-AM-0O1AZ6T00C · Cite as: Assay Systems, “The federal contract register counts every amendment as a contract — Assay Systems”, https://assay-systems.com/register/amendments/
Found 3 September 2026, corrected 27 September 2026 · Source: Proactive Disclosure — Contracts over $10,000, Government of Canada open data, 1,313,540 rows, downloaded 2 September 2026.
The published rows sum to $1.23 trillion. One contract per award, they come to $0.61 trillion. Summing the rows doubles the market.
Every contract in the register already carries the amount of its amendments.
The field amendment_value is defined in the publication guidance as the value of the amendment, and it must be filled on every amendment row.
| 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. The more often a contract is amended, the more often it is counted.
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 of its last row.
For part of the register the contract date holds the date of the amendment, not of the award. A sum by year moves money into the year it was amended.
Rows are grouped by supplier, department, start of the period of work and original value. The last published row of each group is kept. The figures above follow from the public CSV with that rule alone.
The three checks on the amendment rows: Checking the amendment rows of the federal contract register.
Anyone who summed this dataset worked with a figure double the truth. Every figure in an Assay Systems extract is computed one contract per award.