The procurement Directives require that contracts above certain thresholds must be advertised EU-wide in the Supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union providing all relevant information for a given call for tender. Currently, public authorities use for this the standard forms contained in Directive 2001/78/EC. These will be replaced by the new forms that take into account elements introduced by the new procurement Directives (2004/18/EC and 2004/17/EC), e.g. framework agreements, electronic reverse auctions and dynamic purchasing systems.
The greatest advantage of the new forms comes however with online use. If submitted electronically, notices can be published on TED, the EU Tenders Electronic Daily within five days of being sent instead of the former twelve days. In addition, this is expected to reduce significantly administrations’ paper handling costs and to facilitate the processing of tender information.
The regulation on the new standard forms enters into force on 21 October 2005 and is directly applicable in all Member States. Contracting authorities may continue to use the existing standard forms until the end of January 2006 if the new public procurement Directives have not been implemented into national law by then. The new forms will be available online in a structured XML format by the end of October at www.simap.eu.int.
The new forms follow the same structure as the existing ones, while simplifying and streamlining them. The conditions and rules for the use of the new notices are explained in a Commission staff paper on electronic public procurement issued in July 2005.
The revised standard forms are one of the actions envisaged by the Commission’s 2004 “Action Plan for the implementation of the legal framework for electronic public procurement”. This Action Plan aims to take all necessary steps over a three-year period to ensure that electronic public procurement in Europe is implemented as smoothly as possible.
Quelle: Publictechnology, 12.10.2005
