Undisclosed Fields regarding Winners and Tenderers

[JanEmde]

At the last eSender workshop, it was mentioned that it is not yet entirely clear how information about participating and winning organizations can be kept confidential. Is there any news on this?

For us in Germany, it would be very important to mark information relating to unsuccessful tenderes as ‘undisclosed’, separately from the information on the successful bidders.

[AHenselCsx]

Just to extend context:
If I understand the presention, there will be 'groups' of fields, and the indication "undisclosed: yes/no" would be on group level.
A straight-forward approach would be that the winner would be described by a different 'group' than the unsuccessful tenderers, apart from the buyers organizations (and other). I assume this would be the solution on the communication level seen by the eSenders (i.e. structure in the eForm).

But indeed there was an open issue how to implement this group mechanism technically regarding organizations, which all share the same business term fields, but would differ by role.

[ferrakaop]

At the workshop on 27 March we indeed did not present a solution for withholding information about tenderers. This would need to be handled in a different way to our proposal to withhold groups of fields, which would "just" need to mask all the fields of those BTs at all levels of the notice.

It's not possible to use the same technique to withhold fields related to organisations as this depends on their role. Our intention is to offer the option to withhold all organisations linked to tendering party. There is no distinction between winner and non-winner tenderers, as an organisation may be a winner in one lot and a non-winner in another lot in the same notice. The solution also has the benefit of being relatively clear to implement at XML level. We would still use BT-195 to have a particular "group" to indicate that the tenderers must not be disclosed.

This solution was proposed to Member States at an EXEP eForms workshop at the end of April - see https://code.europa.eu/eproc/eforms/crs/-/work_items/221

We had no objections so we will go ahead with this solution, although some MS may chose not to implement it due to national transparency legislation, but the technical option will be made available for eSenders that need it.

We know that this solution may not allow for the granularity to, for example, publish the winning tenderer but to not disclose the non-winning tenderers - but given the structure of eForms and how organisation roles are defined, we believe we can at least satisfy some buyers' need to withhold tenderer data, in particular for the obligation to publish winners, as providing information on non-winning tenderers is optional.