Unpacking the logic behind the magic in the use of AI for anticorruption screening (re Pastor Sanz, 2022)

‘Network of public contracts, contracting bodies, and awarded companies in Spain’ in 2020 and 2021; Pastor Sanz (2022: 7).

[Note: please don’t be put off by talk of complex algorithms. The main point is precisely that we need to look past them in this area of digital governance!].

I have read a new working paper on the use of ‘blackbox algorithms’ as anti-corruption screens for public procurement: I Pastor Sanz, ‘A New Approach to Detecting Irregular Behavior in the Network Structure of Public Contracts’. The paper aims to detect corrupt practices by exploiting network relationships among participants in public contracts. The paper implements complex algorithms to support graphical analysis to cluster public contracts with the aim of identifying those at risk of corruption. The approach in the paper would create ‘risk maps’ to eg prioritise the investigation of suspected corrupt awards. Such an approach could be seen to provide a magical* solution to the very complex issue of corruption monitoring in procurement (or more generally). In this post, I unpack what is behind that magic and critically assess whether it follows a sound logic on the workings of corruption (which it really doesn’t).

The paper is technically very complex and I have to admit to not entirely understanding the specific workings of the graphical analysis algorithms. I think most people with an interest in anti-corruption in procurement would also struggle to understand it and, even data scientists (and even the author of the paper) would be unable to fully understand the reasons why any given contract award is flagged as potentially corrupt by the model, or to provide an adequate explanation. In itself, this lack of explainability would be a major obstacle to the deployment of the solution ‘in the real world’ [for discussion, see A Sanchez-Graells, ‘Procurement Corruption and Artificial Intelligence: Between the Potential of Enabling Data Architectures and the Constraints of Due Process Requirements’]. However, perhaps more interestingly, the difficulty in understanding the model creates a significant additional governance risk in itself: intellectual debt.

Intellectual debt as a fast-growing governance risk

Indeed, this type of very complex algorithmic approach creates a significant risk of intellectual debt. As clearly put by Zittrain,

‘Machine learning at its best gives us answers as succinct and impenetrable as those of a Magic 8-Ball – except they appear to be consistently right. When we accept those answers without independently trying to ascertain the theories that might animate them, we accrue intellectual debt’ (J Zittrain, ‘Intellectual Debt. With Great Power Comes Great Ignorance’, 178).

The point here is that, before relying on AI, we need to understand its workings and, more importantly, the underlying theories. In the case of AI for anti-corruption purposes, we should pay particular attention to the way corruption is conceptualised and embedded in the model.

Feeding the machine a corruption logic

In the paper, the model is developed and trained to translate ‘all the public contracts awarded in Spain in the years 2020 and 2021 into a bi-dimensional map with five different groups. These groups summarize the position of a contract in the network and their interactions with their awarded companies and public contracting bodies’ (at 14). Then, the crucial point from the perspective of a corruption logic comes in:

‘To determine the different profiles of the created groups in terms of corruption risk, news about bad practices or corruption scandals in public procurements in the same period (years 2020 and 2021) has been used as a reference. The news collection process has been manual and the 10 most important general information newspapers in Spain in terms of readership have been analyzed. Collected news about irregularities in public procurements identifies suspicions or ongoing investigations about one public contracting body and an awarded company. In these cases, all the contracts granted by the Public Administration to this company have been identified in the sample and flagged as “doubtful” contracts. The rest of the contracts, which means contracts without apparent irregularities or not uncovered yet, have been flagged as “normal” contracts. A total of 765 contracts are categorized as “doubtful”, representing 0.36% of total contracts … contracts belong to only 25 different companies, where only one company collects 508 granted contracts classified as “doubtful”’ (at 14-15, references omitted and emphasis added).

A sound logic?

This reflects a rather cavalier attitude to the absence of reliable corruption data and to difficulties in labelling datasets for that purpose [for discussion, again, see A Sanchez-Graells, ‘Procurement Corruption and Artificial Intelligence: Between the Potential of Enabling Data Architectures and the Constraints of Due Process Requirements’].

Beyond the data issue, this approach also reflects a questionable understanding of the mechanics of corruption. Even without getting into much detail, or trying to be exhaustive, it seems that this is a rather peculiar approach, perhaps rooted in a rather simplistic intuition of how tenderer-led corruption (such as bribery) could work. It seems to me to have some rather obvious shortcomings.

First, it treats companies as either entirely corrupt or not at all corrupt, whereas it seems plausible that corrupt companies will not necessarily always engage in corruption for every contract. Second, it treats the public buyer as a passive agent that ‘suffers’ the corruption and never seeks, or facilitates it. There does not seem to be any consideration to the idea that a public buyer that has been embroiled in a scandal with a given tenderer may also be suspicious of corruption more generally, and worth looking into. Third, in both cases, it treats institutions as monolithic. This is particularly problematic when it comes to treating the ‘public administration’ as a single entity, specially in an institutional context of multi-level territorial governance such as the Spanish one—with eg potentially very different propensities to corruption in different regions and in relation to different (local/not) players. Fourth, the approach is also monolithic in failing to incorporate the fact that there can be corrupt individuals within organisations and that the participation of different decision-makers in different procedures can be relevant. This can be particularly important in big, diversified companies, where a corrupt branch may have no influence on the behaviour of other branches (or even keep its corruption secret from other branches for rather obvious reasons).

If AI had been used to establish this approach to the identification of potentially corrupt procurement awards, the discussion would need to go on to scrutinise how a model was constructed to generate this hypothesis or insight (or the related dataset). However, in the paper, this approach to ‘conceptualising’ or ‘labelling corruption’ is not supported by machine learning at all, but rather depends on the manual analysis and categorisation of news pieces that are unavoidably unreliable in terms of establishing the existence of corruption, as eg the generation of the ‘scandals’ and the related news reporting is itself affected by a myriad of issues. At best, the approach would be suitable to identify the types of contracts or procurement agents most likely to attract corruption allegations and to have those reported in the media. And perhaps not even that. Of course, the labelling of ‘normal’ for contracts not having attracted such media attention is also problematic.

Final thoughts

All of this shows that we need to scrutinise ‘new approaches’ to the algorithmic detection of corruption (or any other function in procurement governance and more generally) rather carefully. This not only relates to the algorithms and the related assumptions of how socio-technical processes work, but also about the broader institutional and information setting in which they are developed (for related discussion, see here). Of course, this is in part a call for more collaboration between ‘technologists’ (such as data scientist or machine learning engineers) and domain experts. But it is also a call for all scholars and policy-makers to engage in critical assessment of logic or assumptions that can be buried in technical analysis or explanations and, as such, difficult to access. Only robust scrutiny of these issues can avoid incurring massive intellectual debt and, perhaps what could be worse, pinning our hopes of improved digital procurement governance on faulty tools.

_____________

* The reference to magic in the title and the introduction relates to Zittrain’s Magic-8 ball metaphor, but also his reference to the earlier observation by Arthur C. Clarke that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

CJEU greenlights ‘remedying procedural short-comings in return for (proportionate) payment’ (C-523/16 & C-536/16)

In its Judgment of 28 February 2018 in MA.T.I. SUD, C-523/16, EU:C:2018:135, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) accepted the compatibility with EU public procurement law (2004 version) in principle of domestic rules allowing for the 'remedying of procedural shortcomings in return for payment', whereby a contracting authority can invite any tenderer whose tender is vitiated by serious irregularities to rectify that tender, subject to the payment of a financial penalty--provided that the amount of that penalty is proportionate.

However, given previous case law excluding the possibility to remedy serious shortcomings in submitted tenders, the CJEU has stressed that such 'remedial mechanism in return for payment' is subject to the limitation that, despite the existence of such financial penalty, the contracting authority cannot require a tenderer to remedy the lack of a document which, according to the express provisions in the contract documentation, must result in the exclusion of that tenderer, or to eliminate irregularities such that any corrections or changes would amount to a new tender (para 65).

It is important to note, though, that despite establishing this position in principle, the CJEU also provided extremely clear indications that, in its view, there is a need to subject the assessment of the adequacy of the correction of the tenders to a strict assessment to make sure that they do not imply a new tender or the circumvention of the tender documentation (or, in other words, to make sure that the correction is not really of a serious irregularity, but rather a minor one), and that the penalties threatened in the Italian domestic cases that generated the preliminary reference cannot be considered proportionate (paras 62 & 64).

This anticipated analysis of incompatibility in concreto despite compatibility in abstracto begs the question whether the position in principle taken by the CJEU--ie the acceptaibility of non-serious modifications subject to proportionate financial penalties--is an adequate default rule, or whether a different default rule would be preferable--ie the acceptability of non-serious modifications without penalty.

In my view, and largely for the same reasons given in criticising the Opinion of AG Campos Sanchez-Bordona that the CJEU has now followed (see here, where they are developed in detail), in tolerating the imposition of financial penalties as a condition for the remediation of minor procedural defects, the MA.T.I. SUD Judgment sets the wrong default rule and is undesirable for its potential anti-SME effects, as well as due to the potential blurring of the narrow space that actually exists for the correction of serious irregularities under the Manova-Slovensko-Archus and Gama case law (see here, here and here). In adopting a seemingly more flexible approach in principle, in MA.T.I. SUD the CJEU may be creating more confusion than providing clarity, solely with the aim of maintaining a questionable space for domestic procedural administrative discretion. On balance, I would have thought it preferable for the CJEU to indicate more clearly and simply that serious irregularities cannot be corrected (with or without financial penalty), and that the correction of minor irregularities needs to be always accepted without sanction.

In MA.T.I. SUD, the CJEU assessed the compatibility with Art 51 of Directive 2004/18/EC of an Italian provision that enabled tenderers for public contracts to remedy any irregularities in their tenders, but at the same time imposed on them a financial penalty proportional to the value of the contract--of between 0.1% and 1% of the value of the contract, with a maximum ceiling of €50,000. The amount of the penalty was to be set in advance by the contracting authority and guaranteed by a provisional security (or bid bond), and could not be adjusted according to the gravity of the irregularity that it remedied. The maximum penalty was later reduced to €5,000, and eventually suppressed. This reduces the immediate impact of the MA.T.I. SUD Judgment. However, this CJEU ruling will be relevant beyond the specific context of Italian procurement rules, not only in relation with the now phased out transposition of Art 51 of Directive 2004/18, but also with Art 59 of Directive 2014/24/EU (which was not applicable ratione temporis). Both provisions foresee that contracting authorities can seek clarifications from tenderers under specified conditions.

There are some passages of the Judgment I consider relevant:

... when they implement the possibility provided for in Article 51 of Directive 2004/18 [whereby the contracting authority may invite economic operators to supplement or clarify the certificates and documents submitted to it], the Member States must ensure that they do not jeopardise the attainment of the objectives pursued by that directive or undermine the effectiveness of its provisions and other relevant provisions and principles of EU law, particularly the principles of equal treatment and non-discrimination, transparency and proportionality ...

It must also be borne in mind that Article 51 of Directive 2004/18 cannot be interpreted as allowing the contracting authority to accept any rectification of omissions which, as expressly provided for in the contract documentation, had to lead to the exclusion of the tenderer ...

... a request for clarification cannot make up for the lack of a document or information whose production was required by the contract documents, the contracting authority being required to comply strictly with the criteria which it has itself laid down ...

In addition, such a request may not lead to the submission by a tenderer of what would appear in reality to be a new tender

... the very concept of substantial irregularity ... does not appear to be compatible with Article 51 of Directive 2004/18 or with the requirements to which the clarification of a tender in the context of a public contract falling within the scope of Directive 2004/17 is subject, according to the case-law of the Court ...

It follows that the mechanism of assistance in compiling the documentation [under dispute] ... is not applicable if the tender submitted by a tenderer cannot be rectified or clarified within the meaning of the case-law referred ... above, and that, consequently, no penalty can be imposed on the tenderers in such a case (C-523/16, paras 48-49, 51-52 & 55-56 references omitted and emphasis added).

In my view, this reasoning of the CJEU reflects the state of the law and a desirable normative position. It would have allowed the CJEU to simply declare the Italian system incompatible due to the excess that a correction of serious irregularities would imply in comparison with the boundaries on tender modification derived from Manova-Slovensko-Archus and Gama. And the CJEU could have done that without entering into a discussion of whether proportionate penalties for non-substantial modifications are acceptable. On this point, it should be stressed that contested Italian rule also foresaw that '[i]n the case of non-substantial irregularities, that is, any non-essential absence or incompleteness of declarations, the contracting authority shall not require the remedying thereof or impose any penalty' (AGO, C-523/16, para 5). Therefore, in the case at hand, the narrow regulatory space left by the CJEU for the imposition of sanctions would not be occupied by the Italian rules, as the Italian legislator saw no need to sanction any such minor tender corrections.

On the whole, then, the MA.T.I. SUD Judgment seems to unnecessarily create a default rule that can be problematic in the interpretation and operationalisation of the rules in Arts 56 and 59 of Dir 2014/24. This stems from the fact that the CJEU has endorsed the underlying principle that 'the imposition of a financial penalty is indeed an appropriate means of achieving the legitimate objectives pursued by the Member State related to the need to place responsibility on the tenderers in submitting their tenders and to offset the financial burden that any regularisation represents for the contracting authority' (para 63). In my view, this runs contrary to the pro-competitive and pro-SME orientation of the 2014 Public Procurement Package. It also reflects a general understanding of public procurement law not as a mode of governance aimed at ensuring best value for money in the expenditure of public funds, but rather a set of fully justiciable rules aimed at discharging the cost and risk of the procurement function on the economic operators, which is then of course putting pressure at the other end of the spectrum via claims for damages where (complex) justiciable rules are not complied with absolutely. In my view, this creates an unrealistic framework for the carrying out of procurement efforts, and more scope for collaborative approaches within the boundaries of the requirements for equal treatment and competition would be superior.

Therefore, I can only hope that, in the future and with a right case, the CJEU will be able to further clarify its position--or, rectius, to reverse position and rule out the possibility of intra-tender sanctions for minor modifications. This is a normative point and, as I said before, the same way I argue against charging potentially interested tenderers for access to the tender documentation, I also take the normative position that imposing fines for the remediation of documentation shortcomings is undesirable, which leads me to propose their eradication de lege ferenda (by analogy, see A Sanchez-Graells, Public Procurement and the EU Competition Rules, 2nd edn (Oxford, Hart, 2015) 280-281).

 

 

AG suggests CJEU should declare fines for clarification or supplementation of procurement documents as contrary to EU law only if disproportionate (C-523/16)

1_RUGZMXLwiftJ4Cb4dnxLGA.png

In his Opinion of 15 November 2017 in case MA.T.I. SUD, C-523/16, EU:C:2017:868, Advocate General Campos Sánchez-Bordona has considered whether, in a situation where a tenderer for a public contract has submitted incomplete information, national rules subjecting the possibility of supplementing that documentation to the payment of a fine are compatible with EU public procurement law.

The dispute concerned a 2014 reform of the Italian law transposing 'Article 51 of Directive 2004/18/EC in a manner which enabled tenderers for public contracts to remedy any irregularities in their tenders, but at the same time imposed on them a financial penalty proportional to the value of the contract' (para 1)--of between 0.1% and 1% of the value of the contract, with a maximum ceiling of €50,000 (para 5, by reference to Art 38(2a) of the Italian Legislative Decree No 163 of 2006). Interestingly, the rule also foresaw that '[i]n the case of non-substantial irregularities, that is, any non-essential absence or incompleteness of declarations, the contracting authority shall not require the remedying thereof or impose any penalty' (idem).

AG Campos has submitted that Art 51 Dir 2004/18 did not prohibit the imposition of such fines, 'provided that [the national legislation] ensures compliance with the principles of transparency and equal treatment, that the remedying of those irregularities does not make possible the submission of what, in reality, would be a new tender and that the burden is proportionate to the objectives justifying it' (para 80), but that, under the circumstances of the case, a fine of between 0.1% and 1% with a maximum of €50,000 was not allowable (para 80). The AG Opinion and the future Judgment of the Court of Justice will be relevant for the interpretation of Articles 56 and 59 of Directive 2014/24/EU, but I am not sure that the reasoning can be simply carried forward to a regulatory setting that indicates more clearly the conditions for the request of clarifications. In this post, I pick on a few elements of the analysis of AG Campos Sánchez-Bordona in his MA.T.I. SUD Opinion, and reflect on the applicability of the reasoning to the post-2014 setting.

Some preliminary normative thoughts

As a preliminary point, though, I think it worth stressing that the functioning of a system allowing for ‘remedying procedural shortcomings in return for payment’ is probably better understood as a system allowing 'avoiding exclusion for payment', in the sense that an undertaking that has submitted incomplete or unclear documentation is given a chance to avoid exclusion from the procurement procedure under the double condition that (a) it is able to submit a clarification or supplementary documentation that does not materially alter its tender, and (b) it is able (and willing) to pay the financial sanction. While (a) is relevant to the goals of the procurement 'triage' process because the contracting authority has a structural interest in attracting as many (in open procedures) or the best (in restricted and different variations of negotiated procedures) qualified tenderers, (b) is irrelevant unless and except in the case in which the inability to pay the fine signals financial difficulties or bankruptcy--which should in any case be captured by discretionary exclusion grounds based on that specific circumstance. Therefore, (b) comes to create a functional distortion of the procurement procedure and, in particular, of the aims of the qualitative selection phase. 

While sanctions in this setting may be seen as an incentive for undertakings to submit full and accurate documentation, this can also be the type of provision that creates a disincentive to participate, and one that seeks to displace part of the costs of the administrative procedure from the contracting authority unto the tenderers (for, statistically, there will be errors and this type of cost should thus be seen as part of the ordinary costs of running procurement processes). While the financial impact of the 'fine-based remedial system' will then largely be borne by the tenderers, the benefits will also fall on the contracting authority (at least in those cases where the 'paying, sloppy undertaking' ends up being awarded the contract for having submitted the most advantageous tender). This creates a strange trade-off between private costs and private and public benefits, which can be further complicated where the imposition of the fine has a discretionary element to it (eg the possibility to waive the fine for non-essential defects, where the determination of the threshold of 'essentiality' is far from clear-cut and objective).

At first sight, then, this seems like the type of rule that can create perverse incentives--in particular in terms of SME access to procurement procedures, or their ability to continue in the race when they commit mistakes--which comes to raise the threshold of 'professionalism' needed to participate in procurement processes without risking significant financial consequences. On the whole, then, from a normative perspective, I think that this is the kind of rule that seeks to reduce the administrative cost of procurement at the expense of reduced (potential) competition for public contracts, in particular from SMEs. The same way I argue against charging potentially interested tenderers for access to the tender documentation, I would also take the normative position that imposing fines for the remediation of documentation shortcomings is undesirable, and would propose their eradication de lege ferenda (by analogy, see A Sanchez-Graells, Public Procurement and the EU Competition Rules, 2nd edn (Oxford, Hart, 2015) 280-281).

This should be kept in mind when reading the remainder of this post, as this line of normative argumentation was used by the parties. In particular, in the clear formulation of the European Commission, which stressed that 'the contrast between paying a fine for a minor irregularity and the uncertainty of being awarded a contract may cause tenderers, especially small and medium-sized undertakings, not to participate in tenders or, where applicable, to withdraw their participation after the tenders have been submitted' (para 38, although the Commission goes on to note that the payment would be allowable despite its dissuasive effects, 'provided that it pursues a legitimate objective of general interest. Such objectives may include both the aim of making undertakings behave responsibly (encouraging them to act seriously and promptly when supplying the documentation for their tenders) and that of financially compensating the contracting authority for the work involved in the more complicated and extended procedure of remedying procedural shortcomings', para 39, which is not completely aligned with my normative position).

‘Remedying procedural shortcomings in return for payment’ under the pre-2014 EU public procurement rules

In the pre-Slovensko (C-599/10, EU:C:2012:191), pre-Manova (C-336/12, EU:C:2013:647) setting, where some doubts could be harboured as to the possibility for contracting authorities to seek clarifications of the tender documentation, and its limits, the only guidance the then current EU rules provided was to be found in the sparse Article 51 Dir 2004/18/EC, which foresaw that 'The contracting authority may invite economic operators to supplement or clarify the certificates and documents submitted pursuant to Articles 45 to 50'--that is, clarifications or supplements to the certificates and documents concerning (i) the personal situation of the candidate or tenderer (art 45); (ii) its suitability to pursue the professional activity (art 46); (iii) its economic and financial standing (art 47); (iv) its technical and/or professional ability (art 48); (v) its quality assurance standards (art 49); and (vi) its environmental management standards (art 50).

However, Slovensko and Manova came to clarify the possibility for clarifications to be sought (which in my view can result in a duty to seek clarifications under certain conditions, see here), and this seemed to prompt a legislative reaction in Italy. Given the need to allow for clarifications and modifications of the tender documentation in certain cases, Italian procurement law was modified from a system of strict disqualification for formal shortcomings, to as system allowing for 'remedying procedural shortcomings for payment' [see M Comba, 'Qualification, Selection and Exclusion of Economic Operators (Tenderers and Candidates) in Italy', in M Burgi, M Trybus & S Treumer (eds), Qualification, Selection and Exclusion in EU Procurement (DJØF Publishing, 2016) 85, 97-100]. However, this modification of the rules and the increased procedural flexibility were subjected to the payment of an administrative fine by the undertakings that had presented incomplete or unclear documentation (see above).

AG Campos assesses the compatibility of this approach to financially-conditional clarification or supplementation of documents under the rules in Directive 2004/18/EC (as Directive 2014/24/EU was not applicable ratione temporis, see paras 50-52 of his Opinion). In his view, there is 'nothing in [the case-law of the Court on Directive 2004/18] which might preclude the Member States from providing for contracting authorities to charge a certain amount (in this case, as a penalty) to tenderers who have placed themselves in that situation' (para 56, reference omitted). Further, he considers that there is no objection in principle and that any EU-law derived restriction on this possibility would be a matter for a proportionality assessment. In his words,

... national legislation may ... authorise the remedying of formal shortcomings in the tenders, while imposing on the tenderers a certain economic burden in order to encourage them to submit their tenders correctly and to pass on to them the additional cost (if any) arising from the procedure for remedying shortcomings. However, national legislation of that kind, which, owing to the magnitude of that burden, constitutes a not easily surmountable obstacle to the participation of undertakings (in particular, small and medium-sized ones) in public procurement procedures, would run counter to Directive 2014/18 and to the principles underlying it; moreover, this would also undermine the competition to be desired in respect of those procedures (para 58, references omitted and emphasis added).

This leads him to stress that he does 'not consider ... that objections of principle can be raised to a mechanism which makes the correction of shortcomings in the submission of a tender subject to a payment by the person responsible for those shortcomings and required to remedy them' (para 59, emphasis in the original).

AG Campos then proceeds to assess whether such non-negligible restriction to participation is created by the Italian rule at stake. He also addresses the issue whether the Italian provision may be in breach with the Court of Justice's case law on the limits to the allowable modifications and clarifications to tender documentation (paras 60-65). However, this concerns a literal interpretation of the Italian rule (which foresees the possibility of remedying '[a]ny absence, incompleteness or any other substantial irregularity in the information'). However, even if part of the rule should be quashed for exceeding the relevant case law, the possibility would have remained to require payment for the remediation of a 'Manova-like' situation that concerned the absence of (pre-dating) information. Thus, the analysis of the rule remains interesting even in the case of partial incompatibility.

A tricky proportionality assessment

In AG Campos' view, the relevant point is thus to establish whether the financial burden derived from the 'remedy for payment' rule is not an 'easily surmountable obstacle' to participation in procurement procedures, in particular by SMEs. In the second part of his Opinion, he deals with this point and considers two sets of issues. First, he carries out a strict proportionality assessment. Second, he goes back to points of principle despite his previous position that no objections of principle could be raised against the mechanism, which is slightly puzzling.

On the strict proportionality front, the Opinion submits that

The two criticisms of that instrument ... are, on the one hand, that the amount of the penalty is determined a priori, in the contract notice itself, without attempting to assess the magnitude of the irregularities committed or the infringing tenderer’s economic circumstances, and, on the other hand, that the resulting amounts (up to a maximum of EUR 50 000) do not comply with the principle of proportionality. Moreover, the exorbitant amount of the penalty is such as to deter participation in the tendering process, especially by small and medium-sized undertakings, thereby restricting competition.

... the objectives which might justify the imposition of the penalties are not consistent with the minimum and maximum amounts of those penalties...

Of course, the argument of higher administrative costs does not justify such substantial amounts: it should be borne in mind that even the minimum of 0.1 per cent (and a fortiori 1 per cent), in contracts subject to [Union] directives, is in itself high, given the lower thresholds for the application of those directives. That argument is also not consistent with a single amount which is established a priori and consists in a percentage of the amount of the contract, since it would be logical, following that line of thought, to tailor to each individual case to the resulting higher costs.

The disproportionate nature of the penalties is evident in the present two cases, which merely arise from the practical application of the legal provision: an executive’s forgetting to sign and the failure to provide a sworn statement regarding a criminal record result in fines of EUR 35 000 and EUR 50 000 respectively. I find it difficult to accept that the higher cost to the contracting authorities, merely for detecting those two anomalies and for inviting the tenderers to remedy them, corresponds to those amounts, which seem rather to be designed to increase their revenue (paras 71-74, references omitted and emphasis in the original).

This part of the reasoning seems unobjectionable and comes to challenge the possibility of imposing a fine for the remedying of documentation, rather than imposing a duty to cover any additional administrative costs ensuing from the remedial action--which would have been preferable, even if still normatively undesirable (see above). Importantly, this part of the reasoning would have sufficed to quash the Italian provision at stake. However, the Opinion proceeds to assert that

Nor does the aim of ensuring the seriousness of tenders justify such large fines. In the first place, because such fines are imposed (as stated in the tender specifications) regardless of the number of irregularities, that is, regardless of the type of information or document which is missing or must be supplemented and of its greater or lesser significance. The provision treats the offences in a uniform manner and allows their level of complexity to be disregarded.

In the second place, that aim [of ensuring the seriousness of tenders] must be weighed against that of promoting the widest possible participation of tenderers, resulting in greater competition and, in general, the best service to public interests. An excessive penalty will probably deter undertakings with smaller financial resources from participating in calls for tenders for high-value contracts, given the percentage limits stated above. They might also be deterred from participating in future calls for tenders which include the same penalty provision.

Moreover, such a burden will be even more of a deterrent to ‘tenderers established in other Member States, inasmuch as their level of knowledge of national law and the interpretation thereof and of the practice of the national authorities cannot be compared to that of national tenderers’.

In short, a provision the purpose of which was, precisely, to help to remedy formal errors made by tenderers (by amending the previous national rule) and, thereby, to increase their chances of successfully participating in public procurement procedures ultimately deters such participation by imposing financial burdens which are disproportionate to its objective (paras 75-78, references omitted and emphasis added).

In this second part, AG Campos seems to adopt a half-way approach to the objection in principle to the establishment of dissuasive barriers to participation, but only through disproportionate or excessive penalties. I find this problematic because it is very difficult establish at which level the dissuasive effect will kick-in, regardless of what can be considered excessive or disproportionate for the purposes of finding an infringement of EU internal market law. Thus, as mentioned above, I think that there are good reasons to oppose the creation of these mechanisms out of principle (the principle of maximising competition for public contracts, to be precise) and, from that perspective, I find the Opinion in MA.T.I. SUD unnecessarily shy or insufficiently ambitious. This does not affect the outcome of the specific case, but perpetuates the problem in view of the 2016 reform of the controversial Italian law, as discussed below.

‘Remedying procedural shortcomings in return for payment’ under the post-2014 EU public procurement rules

Interestingly, the case comprises a dynamic element that remains unresolved. It is worth noting that the Italian rule at stake in MA.T.I. SUD has been amended, and a 2016 reform relaxed 'the conditions for requiring the fine (imposing it only if rectification is required) and reduced its maximum ceiling (from EUR 50 000 to EUR 5 000)' (para 8). Additionally, any substantive assessment of the revised rule will now have to take place within the setting of the rules in Directive 2014/24/EU, where it can be argued that contracting authorities are under a duty to seek clarifications [for discussion, see A Sanchez-Graells, Public Procurement and the EU Competition Rules, 2nd edn (Oxford, Hart, 2015) 321-323]. In my view, in this setting, the analysis should not rely on a matter of proportionality, but on a more sophisticated understanding of the functions and balance of interests involved in the qualitative selection phase of each procurement procedure, which very much opposes the levying of financial penalties for clarifications sought by the contracting authority, regardless of their amount.

My view seems to run contrary to that of AG Campos and the European Commission, which both seem to have hinted at the fact that the new maximum amount of €5,000 for necessary rectifications saves the mechanism. This is seen with favour by both the European Commission in its submissions ('a maximum ceiling of EUR 5 000, such as that adopted by the new Public Contracts Code, is more reasonable', para 41) and, in less clear terms, by the AG ('Perhaps that reform, by significantly reducing the absolute maximum ceiling to EUR 5 000, was a response to the national legislature’s belief that that ceiling had been excessive, as the referring court implies', para 72).

If this represented the position the European Commission would defend in a future case involving the revised Italian rule, and/or the position taken in an Advocate General Opinion, I would strongly disagree because I do not consider helpful the view that €5,000 per rectification is 'more reasonable' or 'less excessive' than €50,000 per error (unless waived due to its non-essential character). Going back to the principles behind the creation of this type of mechanisms, important questions remain as to whether the goals it seeks to achieve are either justified in the public interest, or not already sought by other aspects of the procurement rules.

As submitted by the Italian Government and the Commission, the double legitimate goal of the measure would be 'first, to make the tenderer responsible for acting diligently when producing the documentation which will accompany his tender and, second, to compensate the contracting authority for the additional work involved in administering a procurement procedure which allows for the possibility of remedying those irregularities' (para 70).

On the second point, I am not sure that there is a clear public interest in seeking to recover part or all of the administrative costs involved in rectifying qualitative selection decisions in the view of supplemented or clarified information, in particular because this recovery of costs comes at the expense of an immeasurable potential reduction of competition (and, if one is to adopt AG Campos' reasoning, particularly acute in the case of undertakings from other jurisdictions, see para 77--although I am not sure this part of the argument is persuasive). On the first point, the argument that the financial penalty will ensure that undertakings participating in tender procedures will act diligently seems moot. The main incentive for undertakings to act diligently in the preparation of their tenders is the economic incentive derived from being awarded the contract. Thus, creating a negative incentive that works in the same direction that the main economic incentive (ie to prompt undertakings to submit their best possible tender) makes no economic sense because it creates a double-whammy on less diligent tenderers, whereas it adds no incentive for diligent tenderers.

By isolating the qualitative selection phase and thinking that tenderers have an interest in acting in less than diligent terms (within their abilities) seems to me to miss the point. While the frustration at the administrative burden of carrying out several (or at least two) iterations of inspection of documents where there have been mistakes is understandable, that should not lead to the creation of financial penalty mechanism that is bound to both be ineffective in what it tries to achieve and to create a likely high shadow cost in terms of lost potential competition for public contracts. In that regard, I would have preferred for the Italian mechanism to be quashed as a matter of principle on this occasion. But, even if this does not happen and the Court of Justice follows the intermediate approach of AG Campos' Opinion, I would still hope that a fresh consideration of the revised Italian rule under the setting of Directive 2014/24/EU delivered that result.

Postscript [16 Nov 2017, 9am]

After publishing this post, it was brought to my attention that I had missed the additional information in fn 5 of AG Campos' Opinion, where he explains that the Italian fees for remediation of documentation shortcomings has been abolished. Indeed, the fn says:

Although it can have no bearing on the consideration of the questions referred ... a further, more radical amendment of the Code ... occurred in 2017. In fact, Legislative Decree No 56/2017 of 19 April issued a new draft of Article 89(3) which definitively removed the requirement to pay for the remedying of shortcomings upon its entry into force (20 May 2017). Since then, economic operators have been able to rectify the absence of any formal element from their proposals (except those relating to the economic and technical aspects of the tender) without incurring any kind of penalty or other similar charge.

Thus, the issue will remain unresolved, unless similar charges or financial penalties exist in other jurisdictions.