Effective international trade in government procurement depends on predictable legal structures, including those that address corruption and misconduct in tender processes. But at this point, the purchaser’s primary tools to maintain integrity — debarment or exclusion — remain wildly out of sync on both sides of the Atlantic. This annual free symposium on transatlantic issues in procurement, hosted by King’s College London and George Washington University Law School, focused this year on debarment and exclusion. In a highly successful day of frank and collegial discussions, judges, officials, attorneys and professors from the multilateral development banks, the European Union and the United States joined to discuss the best ways forward to harmonize a common approach to debarment in international trade.
Please note (see below) that because of the strong interest in this program, it was moved to a larger room at Gray’s Inn.
Change of Venue: The Pensions Room, Grays Inn, 8 South Square, London, WC1R 5ET (map) (map of access to Grays Inn during construction)
Reservation page here
Program materials
Introductions (10-10:15)
Panel I: Establishing an Exclusion System (10:15-11:15)
Panel II: Sanctions and Exclusions at the Multilateral Development Banks (11:30-12:30)
- World Bank: Fillable Survey: A Global View of Debarment
- Collin Swan & Belita Manka, Risky Business: Does Debarring Poor Performers Mitigate Future Performance Risk? (working paper submitted to the Third International Conference on Public Procurement Law in Africa, organized by the African Procurement Law Unit at Stellenbosch University (1-2 November 2018))
Lunch(12:30-13:30)
Panel III: View from the Private Bar(13:30-14:30)
- John Pachter, Christopher Yukins & Jessica Tillipman, U.S. Debarment: An Introduction (discussion draft 24 February 2019), forthcoming in Cambridge Handbook of Compliance (Cambridge University Press, Daniel Sokol & Benjamin van Rooij eds.).
- Pascal Friton, Debarment in EU Public Procurement Law – Tentative progress or treading water? (presented at Thomson Reuters Government Contracts Year in Review (Feb. 2019))
- UK Cabinet Office, Procurement Policy Note – Applying Exclusions in Public Procurement, Managing Conflicts of Interest and Whistleblowing Information Note PPN 01/19, 22 February 2019
Panel IV: Interactions Between Public Procurement and Civil and Criminal Claims (14:30-15:30)
Robert D. Anderson, Alison Jones & William E. Kovacic, Preventing Corruption, Supplier Collusion and the Corrosion of Civic Trust: A Procompetitive Program to Improve the Effectiveness and Legitimacy of Public Procurement (George Mason Law Review, forthcoming 2019).
Tea (15:30-16:00)
Panel V: Judges Panel (16:00-17:oo)
- Elisabeth Lang & Marc Steiner, Public Procurement Regulation: Fostering Market Access and Simultaneously Preventing Corruption — A Swiss Perspective, British Journal of White Collar Crime, Vol. III, No. 1, 14 (Winter 2017/2018).
Reception (17:00)
Supplemental Materials
- Emmanuelle Auriol & Tina Søreide, An Economic Analysis of Debarment, 50 Int’l Rev. L. & Econ. 36 (2017) (arguing that debarment needs to be rethought in light of its competitive impacts)
- Presentation by Prof Michal Kania at the University of Florida, January 2019, on U.S. and European approaches to debarment and corporate compliance
- Christopher R. Yukins & Michal Kania, Suspension and Debarment in the U.S. Government: Comparative Lessons for the EU’s Next Steps in Procurement, 19-2 UrT 47 (2019), available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3422499
The Trump administration recently released the proposed text of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a major regional trade agreement that, if ratified, would replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). While the government procurement chapter of the proposed USMCA was largely a copy-and-paste from the abandoned