Spain, at the tail of the EU in competition to award public contracts

Spain, at the tail of the EU in competition to award public contracts

In one third of state companies only one company participates and the CNMC states that with open processes the Administration would save up to 350 million annually

Spain suspends in matters of transparency and openness of public procurement . It is affirmed by the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) and endorsed, according to her, "different" national and international organizations "that have shown" that this system "is very improvable in terms of efficiency" and, derived from of the same, also of extra costs.

Compared with the rest of the EU countries, according to the body presided by José María Marín Quemad a, he would be in the queue for his " little competition in public procurement". For example, in one third of the tenders (practically 34%) of the Administration, only "one participant" comes in, while in two out of three (65%) there are at most three.

Another data "of great concern", according to the report made public this Friday by the CNMC, is that in contracts with a reduced amount "very often" is used for agreements "negotiated without advertising". On the contrary, in the agreements of greater economic volume , open adjudication processes predominate .

However, the Commission's technicians have noted an "important threshold effect" that may be harmful to public interests. Many of the contracts negotiated without publicity remained "on the verge of the thresholds foreseen in the previous law" - since almost a year ago there has been a new and stricter regulation: 60,000 euros for services and supplies , 200,000 for works . Precisely this last type of agreements are those that will allow to obtain more savings -about 13%, at least double the rest- with greater transparency, also being where higher budgets are handled .

The more opening, the more savings
After analyzing almost 36,000 state tenders -the autonomous, provincial and local ones have been ruled out due to their "complexity" when it comes to standardizing data-, they estimate that the open procedure obtains, on average, a decrease of 17.2% compared to the initial price with an average of seven participants, while the non-advertised barely reaches half (8%) with 2.3 participants. The Administration , according to their study, pays on average about 10% less in the contests to which any company or person can go, than in those that suffer some kind of entry restriction.

If all the contracts were awarded by the first system, they conclude from the CNMC , the public coffers would have saved "about 1,700 million euros" between 2012 and 2016, that is, an annual average of 350 million. That is why it makes four major recommendations to the Administrations - not only the state ones, but also the territorial ones - that go through improving the "integration of their databases", achieving "a higher level of supervision in the rigor of the information " published, "To take as its own the objective of a more efficient and competitive public procurement" and, finally, to choose the procedures "most appropriate to the specific circumstances" of each case.