Brussels, 08/01/2001 (Agence Europe) - The special Court of Auditors report on procedures for the award of contracts for services under the Phare (Eastern and Central Europe) and Tacis (technical assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States) programmes, just published in the Official Journal (C 350), highlights several important procedural shortcomings and inconsistencies in the award of contracts, but the Court also considers that measures taken since that time by the Commission to improve the system should resolve a good many of these problems.
The Court of Auditors monitored 120 technical assistance contracts (80 for Phare and 40 for Tacis), mostly concluded following a restricted call for bids between 1996 and 1998. This review followed a request by the European Parliament's rapporteur for discharge to the Commission for the 1997 budget. Concerned about deficiencies, Parliament asked the Court to check into compliance with procedures for the award of contracts in the framework of Phare and Tacis during this period.
The award of contracts is essentially governed by the general financial regulation, and by the specific Phare and Tacis regulations. The general financial regulation requires that the most economically advantageous bid be chosen, but authorises restricted invitations to tender for service contracts and technical cooperation actions. In the context of restricted invitations, the Commission or the programme management units establish -on the basis of the expressions of interest received- a restricted list of companies considered most capable of implementing the operation in question. These pre-selected companies are then invited to submit a bid for services. The bids are evaluated by an ad hoc committee, which first proceeds with a technical evaluation, followed by a financial evaluation.
The Court's review brought to light several problems: the most important are related to the evaluation of bids and the existence of documentary proof. These consultations affect more than half the Phare and Tacis cases examined. The Court also criticises in its report the use of different contract award procedures (from 1996 to 1998) for Phare and Tacis, since "there is no justification of so many procedural differences between Phare and Tacis for the award of contracts for services".
Since that time, the Commission developed (in June 1999) a new "instruction handbook" on contracts for services, supplies and works concluded in the framework of Community cooperation with third countries (see below). This handbook aims to introduce more consistent and rigorous practices, with no distinctions between programmes in all areas of external assistance. Strict application of these measures should remedy the different shortcomings pointed out in its report, notes the Court of Auditors. But the Court also warns against overly hasty satisfaction: creation of the Joint External Relations Service and the unification of procedures for the award of contracts concluded pursuant to cooperation with third countries are just the first step, because it is in the financial regulation applicable to the Community budget that the required harmonisation should be achieved. The problems observed only accentuate the urgency of such harmonisation and the need to perpetuate simpler rules, notes the report.
The Court of Auditors also highlights shortcomings in file management, in particular an excessive scattering of documents, incomplete or even lost documentation and difficulty, if not impossibility, of identifying the person responsible for management. For 27 Phare and 15 Tacis files reviewed, the Court was unable to assess fully the regularity of procedures for the award of contracts, because of misplaced bids or lost evaluations. Further, remarks the Court in its report, the information needed to understand how the procedure works was not always available.
By way of conclusion, the Court of Auditors asserts that, if the Commission wishes to attain the transparency goals it has set for itself in the award of contracts, in the future it should:
inform bidders of the exact methods used for the technical and financial assessment of bids;
ensure that the committee charged with evaluating bids respects the practical arrangements and evaluation criteria established and notified to bidders;
set in place a standardised archiving system that places in a single file all information related to the invitation to tender. The Commission should also forward clear and uniform archiving instructions to all its external delegations, to make subsequent inspections possible;
Commission united does not deny existence of certain problems, but underlines
improvements introduced since 1997
The European Commission, in its answer annexed to the report, underlined that its attaches great importance to the respect for market approval procedures and that, in this context, "many measures" have been taken since 1997, are in the process of being introduced, to improve the system, notably:
- the elaboration of a new instruction manual applicable (since 2000) to the Phare and Tacis programmes, in order to harmonise the procedures;
- the editing of instructions in view of improving the achieving system with delegations;
- the creation of a SCR web site in which will be published all the opinions of markets and all the information concerning them, in order to improve transparency;
- the standardisation of calls for tender documents and contracts in view of the rationalisation of documents.
More generally, without wanting to deny the existence of real problems during the period in question, the Commission notes that, out of the 68 problematic cases found by the Court, 36 exclusively concern the incomplete holding of dossiers. Out of the 32 others, only 5 Phare cases have had a true influence one the result of the call for tenders, feels the Commission.