European Court of Auditors (ECA) publishes special report on public procurement in the EU

On 4 December, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) published a special report on public procurement in the EU.

As the EU’s independent external auditor, one of the roles of the Court is to produce audit reports concerning the state of play on the implementation of EU policies, formulating recommendations to policymakers (i.e. the Commission) to help them better address issues flagged in the report in future actions.

In the report at hand, the Court stresses the key role of public procurement in the EU Single Market, from both an economic and integration perspective, and the importance of the promotion of competitive and efficient public procurement markets within the EU. While acknowledging that the Commission and the Member States have taken actions to increase the level of competition in public procurement, the Court underlines that they have not exploited the tools offered by the 2014 Directives to their fullest potential to achieve its objectives and boost competition. Analysing in detail the performance of indicators such as the share of single bidding, the number of direct awards in several Member States, and the number of cross-border procurements, the Court concludes that the competition in the EU public procurement markets overall decreased in the period 2011-2021.

Consequently, the Court formulated four recommendations to the Commission concerning some remaining challenges to be addressed, which are: 1) clarify and prioritise public procurement objectives; 2) close the gaps in the public procurement data collected; 3) improve its monitoring tools to allow better analysis; 4) deepen the root cause analysis and put forward measures to overcome key obstacles to competition in public procurement and promote best practices.

Together with the special report, the Commission replies to the European Court of Auditors is published. In this document, the Commission accepts all the recommendations of the Court and illustrates recent and future actions planned to improve competition in the public procurement markets.

The report and the Commission replies are available here.