The evaluation committee: two conflicts and a missing signature
You chair the evaluation committee for a €2.4 million framework contract at an EU body. Five tenders arrived before the deadline. You left your previous employer, a consultancy, eighteen months ago; that consultancy has now submitted a bid, naming your former close colleague as project manager. Separately, you notice that the CV of a colleague sitting on your committee appears in a different bid, as a named expert. The lowest-priced bid, from a technically strong consortium, omits a signed declaration required by the tender specifications; the procurement officer tells you it was “clearly an oversight” and that the committee could simply request it later. The contract must be signed by 31 December or the budget line lapses and the programme loses its funding for the year. One committee member suggests you “sort out the small issues afterwards” to protect the timetable.
1. You have a potential conflict. What exactly do you do, and what do you do about your colleague's CV appearing in another bid?
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The governing point is that a conflicted evaluation does not just look bad - it can be annulled, and the contract challenged, which costs far more than the delay you are trying to avoid. The timetable is not a legal argument.
Your own position. Declare in writing, immediately, to the appointing authority and the procurement officer: former employer, eighteen months since departure, former close colleague named as project manager. Do not decide for yourself that you can be objective; that judgement belongs to someone else. Ask to be replaced as chair for the evaluation of that tender - and consider stepping back from chairing altogether, since committee deliberation covers all bids. In the meantime, do not open, read, copy or take home that bid, and have no contact with the consultancy.
Your colleague. The same test applies with less ambiguity: a person whose CV is in a bid has a direct interest in that bid succeeding. They must be excluded from the evaluation of that tender at minimum; if the committee evaluates all five together, replacing them is cleaner. Their declaration should be recorded too - you should not be the one assessing whether their inclusion was innocent.
Record everything. Both declarations belong in the evaluation report as formal conflict-of-interest statements, with dates. If you have to restart or reconstitute the committee, say so in writing with reasons.
What would change the answer: only a written decision by the appointing authority that, on the facts, no conflict exists. Your own assurance is not enough.
2. The lowest-priced, technically strong bid is missing a required signed declaration. The procurement officer calls it an oversight. How do you handle it?
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This is where goodwill quietly becomes unequal treatment. The instinct - help a good bid over a technicality to protect the timetable - is precisely what an auditor or a losing tenderer will later characterise as favouritism.
Go to the rule, not the intention. Read the tender specifications: is the signed declaration a formal requirement whose absence leads to exclusion, or an administrative document that can be completed before signature? That distinction is already written down; your job is to apply it, not to invent a middle way. Ask procurement and legal for the applicable provision in writing.
Equal treatment governs. Whatever you do for this bid, you must be able to do for every bid, visibly. If clarification is permitted at all, it is normally limited to obvious clerical errors and cannot allow a tenderer to remedy a substantive non-compliance after the deadline - otherwise bidders who complied are penalised for complying.
No coaching. Any request for clarification goes in writing, identically framed to any other tenderer in the same position, and must not change the substance of the offer - no new prices, no new experts.
If exclusion follows, exclude. Note the price and technical strength in the report so the file shows the committee understood what it was giving up and why the rule required it.
Handle the procurement officer's view properly: acknowledge the intention, state that the decision must rest on the specifications, and record the exchange. If they genuinely believe the requirement is administrative, ask them to confirm that in writing - that is a decision with a name attached, which is as it should be.
3. The 31 December signature deadline is now at risk. How do you manage the timetable pressure and the hierarchy's expectation?
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The worst outcome is a compliant process that fails silently, or a fast process that fails legally. Your job is to make the trade-off visible early enough for someone with the authority to choose.
Establish what the date actually is. Is 31 December a legal commitment deadline under the financial rules, an administrative target, or a locally imposed cut-off? Ask the authorising officer, in writing, what happens to the funds if signature slips: is there a carry-over, an N+1 rule, a possibility of committing in January? People often assert a deadline is absolute because nobody has tested it.
Set out options with consequences. A short note: (a) reconstitute the committee and evaluate properly, signature likely mid-January, funds at risk if X; (b) re-launch, funds lost this year; (c) if the rules genuinely permit, a negotiated or split procedure - but only if legal confirms it, not because it is convenient. Recommend one and state who must decide by when.
Frame the risk in the language the hierarchy uses: annulment, Ombudsman complaint, Court of Auditors finding, an unsuccessful tenderer's challenge. A contract signed against the rules is not funding secured; it is funding exposed.
Push the decision upward in time. Tell your head of unit and the authorising officer now, not on 20 December, and put the request for a decision in writing with a deadline. Silence until the deadline passes is the one failure that will be attributed to you personally.
Do not let a committee member's “sort it out afterwards” become the recorded position without a written response explaining why you do not accept it.