March 3, 2023
Please join a special one-hour colloquium online, jointly organized by George Washington University Law School’s Government Procurement Law Program and Austria’s centralized Federal Procurement Agency, the Bundesbeschaffung Austria (BBG), to discuss how countries and their procuring agencies can exchange contractor qualification information, a vitally important topic in opening markets, fighting corruption and improving contract performance.
Panelists
Gian Luigi Albano, a head of division at Italy’s centralized purchasing agency (Consip), will discuss practical hurdles, grounded in organizational theory, to exchanging contractor information between governments.
Lucian Cernat and Zornitsa Kutlina-Dimitrova, senior economists at the European Commission, will discuss efforts by the Commission to ease exchanges of contractor information to reduce barriers to trade in procurement, and to improve trade analysis.
Mihály (Misi) Fazekas, assistant professor at the Central European University (Vienna) and scientific director of a think tank, the Government Transparency Institute, will discuss an innovative tool, TenderX, which assembles qualification information from multiple government sources around the world.
Lindle Hatton, Chief Executive Officer of the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO), will discuss coordination among U.S. states through NASPO ValuePoint contracts.
Kathrin Frauscher, Deputy Executive Director at the Open Contracting Partnership, will explain how procurement data can be made open, accessible and readable for use across multiple procurement systems.
Maria Swaby, Procurement Ombudsman and former Suspension & Debarment Official for the U.S. General Services Administration, who lectures on debarment and contractor qualifications at the GW Law School, will discuss how the US. Government makes contractor qualification information available through the System for Award Management (sam.gov) and related online platforms,
Moderators
Research Resources
- Access2Procurement tool – EU tool for vendors to assess qualification for non-discrimination under trade agreements.
- European single procurement document and eCertis – European initiative to use a single qualification document across the Member States.
- Zornitsa Kutlina-Dimitrova & Lucian Cernat, Public Procurement: How open is the European Union to US firms and beyond? (Mar. 2020)
- OECD, Professionalising the Public Procurement Workforce (Jan. 2023) – see discussion of BBG’s “Public Procurement Excellence” program (page 68)
- Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS)
- Open Contracting Partnership, How Open Data Helps WTO GPA Objectives
- TenderX – “Integrity Tool” gathers contractor qualification information from multiple national sources.
- U.S. Government resources — federal contractor qualification information – System for Award Management (sam.gov): contractor qualification (responsibility) data, debarment information, and responsibility & integrity records (including administrative agreements)
- How to Crack a Nut — Professor Sanchez-Graells’ blog, which includes new papers on artificial intelligence and public procurement.