One-year anniversary of the Competition Register for Public Procurement – a digital register to support public contracting entities in public procurement procedures

A year ago today, the Competition Register for Public Procurement was put into full operation at the Bundeskartellamt. The Competition Register provides all public contracting authorities, sector contracting entities and concession grantors in Germany with information helping them to assess whether a company must or can be excluded from a public procurement procedure for having committed economic offences. The obligation for contracting entities to consult the Competition Register as well as various rights to information relating to the Register became applicable on 1 June 2022.

Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt: “The Competition Register for Public Procurement is making a significant contribution to the efficient execution of procurement procedures and to ensuring fair competition for public contracts. Since the obligation for contracting entities to consult the Competition Register became applicable a year ago, the Register has been consulted over 220,000 times; in the past few months it has been consulted well over 1,000 times per day, on average. There is a fair number of cases where contracting entities receive information on entries in the Register that help them to determine whether or not to exclude a company from the procurement procedure. The Competition Register thus provides companies with an important incentive to step up their compliance efforts.”

Contracting authorities are obliged to consult the Competition Register in procurement procedures involving an estimated order value of 30,000 euros (excluding VAT) or more. Sector contracting entities and concession grantors have to consult the register if the threshold values which are also decisive for the applicability of the procedural rules under the German Competition Act (GWB) are reached. Contracting entities can also consult the Register on a voluntary basis even if these thresholds are not met.

The Competition Register is consulted electronically via a web portal. The contracting entities will receive the information from the Register electronically too. This makes it considerably easier for contracting entities to obtain the relevant information and promotes an efficient execution of procurement procedures.

Approximately 7,000 companies are currently entered in the Register based on decisions imposing sanctions on them issued by public prosecuting authorities and authorities imposing administrative fines. An entry can be deleted prematurely if the company in question proves that it has fulfilled the requirements for what is referred to as self-cleaning. Self-cleaning requirements include compensating any damage caused by the company’s misconduct, cooperating with the investigating authorities and adopting measures to prevent further misconduct. Once an entry has been deleted prematurely by the Bundeskartellamt, this entry no longer justifies the exclusion by any contracting entity of the affected company from public procurement procedures under public procurement law.

Detailed information on the Competition Register for Public Procurement as well as information on individual procedures can be found on the Bundeskartellamt’s website.