On December 9, 2024, in celebration of International Anti-Corruption Day, GW Law’s Christopher Yukins will join the International Anti-Corruption Academy (IACA) to discuss IACA’s future contributions to global efforts to fight corruption in public procurement.
Our work over the years with IACA has allowed us to explore how risk-based anti-corruption strategies complement – and strengthen – public procurement outcomes. Bid challenges (protests), for example, and contractor compliance, debarments and legislative oversight — all of these mitigate both the risks of failure in public procurement and the risks of corruption. The next step will be to integrate those risk-based anti-corruption strategies with international best practices, such as through the OECD and the European Union’s forthcoming revised procurement directives.
Spurred by the report on The Future of European Competitiveness led by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, institutions across Europe are examining how to promote innovation through public procurement. On November 13-14, 2024, GW Law’s Christopher Yukins met with his colleagues in Europe about these ongoing initiatives.
Photo: C. Yukins, N. Meershoek, W. Jannsen, E. Manunza, Elior Korem
At the University of Utrecht’s School of Law, Professor Yukins met with Professor Elisabetta Manunza and her team to discuss academic cooperation between the EU and U.S. procurement research communities. Among other things, they discussed ongoing research with NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA). University of Utrecht Associate Professor Willem Janssen and University of Auckland professor Marta Andhov have dealt often with issues of innovation through procurement in their award-winning podcast, BESTEK. Utrecht Assistant Professor Nathan Meershoek has written extensively on the challenges of innovation in defense procurement; NATO’s unit to foster innovative technology, DIANA, is one answer to those challenges.
DIANA was established by NATO to find and accelerate dual-use innovation capacity across the Alliance. DIANA provides companies with the resources, networks and guidance to develop deep technologies to solve critical defense and security challenges.
Professor Yukins also met with Stephan Corvers and his team in s-Hertogenbosch. The CORVERS consultants are legal experts in strategic public procurement, innovation and contracting. CORVERS has been asked to help assess best practices in procurement for innovation, from around the world, on behalf of the European Assistance For Innovation Procurement – EAFIP, an initiative financed by the European Commission (DG CONNECT) to provide local assistance to public procurers to promote innovation and best practices.
A few days after those meetings, the European Commission announced a series of initiatives to advance innovation in procurement. Those initiatives included a public consultation on possible updates to the EU procurement directives — including, importantly, a review of how the directives might be updated to foster innovation.
David Drabkin, Daniel Schoeni and Christopher Yukins spoke at the “Upphandlings-Konferensen” (“Public Procurement Conference”) held in Stockholm on April 25-26, 2024. The conference was very kindly hosted by Professor Andrea Sundstrand of Stockholm University.
David Drabkin
Dave Drabkin and Chris Yukins’ presentation, drawing on their report on debarment for the Acquisition Innovation Research Center, addressed convergence of the contractor exclusion/debarment systems in the United States and the European Union. A recent decision by the Court of Justice for the European Union, Infraestruturas de Portugal SA, explained that the EU Public Procurement Directive should be read to mean that procuring agencies in the EU have clear first authority to handle vendor exclusions and to assess vendors’ misconduct and remedial measures — from the U.S. perspective, a critical step in building effective risk-based debarment regimes in Europe to allow agencies to manage supply chain risk. (For background on the Infraestruturas decision, see Adrian Brown‘s recent piece in the Public Procurement Law Review and Albert Sanchez-Graell’s insightful analysis.)
Daniel Schoeni
Daniel Schoeni’s presentation — which was very well-received by the assembly of Swedish procurement attorneys — reviewed the parallels between the EU and the U.S. systems. Drawing on his PhD thesis at the University of Nottingham, Dan Schoeni explained that while the legal frameworks in the U.S. and the EU are remarkably similar, their foundations and implementations vary widely because of their different histories, politics and perspectives.
Professor Andrea Sundstrand – Stockholm University
Please feel free to join this interesting presentation on EU defense procurement and the decisions of the European Court of Justice. Professor Sundstrand of Stockholm University will discuss her article on the intersection of Member State autonomy over defense matters and the European Union’s authority to direct procurement rules.
Wednesday, 14 February 2024 – 3 pm – GW Law School, 2000 H Street NW, Washington DC – Stockton 306
This was a contribution to a special edition of the University of Nottingham’s Public Procurement Law Review on defense procurement in light of the war in Ukraine. What follows is the abstract, including the British spelling:
Rather than summarising the US national procurement regime for defence—the approach taken by many valuable contributions to this special edition, regarding other nations—this article defers to the existing literature and instead places the US practice of defence procurement law in a broader context, especially in light of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The US experience is that civilian and military purchasing are largely interchangeable, and that hard lessons learned from both quarters, such as in the procurement of supplies in a battle zone and the elimination of trade barriers, could be used to advance the cause of Ukraine and its democratic allies in the current war. The moral imperatives presented by the war in Ukraine are obvious, and this brief piece concludes that legal practitioners in our discipline, even if they are not specifically defence experts, can share a common skillset crucial to preserving democracy and rebuilding Ukraine, despite this terrible war.
This article was first published by Thomson Reuters, trading as Sweet & Maxwell, 5 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5AQ, in the Public Procurement Law Review, 32 Pub. Proc. L. Rev. 445 (2023), and is reproduced by agreement with the publishers. For further details, please see the publishers’ website. The manuscript version of the article is available here on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
Gian Luigi Albano of Italy’s centralized purchasing agency, CONSIP, joined Keith McCook (a senior procurement attorney in South Carolina government) and GW Law’s Christopher Yukins on November 10, 2023 to discuss the law-and-economics of framework agreements (which in the U.S. system are known as “indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity” contracts).
They spoke at the 10th anniversary meeting of the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) Law Institutein New Orleans. The Law Institute is a regular gathering of chief procurement officers (CPOs) and state public procurement attorneys from around the United States.
On June 7, 2023, GW Law School’s Prof. Christopher Yukins will address a Brussels conference, organized through Utrecht University, “Challenges for Public Procurement in Europe and Beyond: Concept Programme.” He will address the EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR), which will impose heavy disclosure requirements on vendors from abroad — including vendors from the United States — competing for EU Member State public procurements. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has recommended that members of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) be exempted from the FSR; Professor Yukins discusses that proposed exemption in his brief presentation (click here for slides).
For background materials and a prior webinar on the FSR, click here
