Transparency is one of the pillars of the auditors’ work. As a key safeguard against the risk of fraud and corruption, transparency helps ensure that citizens maintain their trust in the EU. This is why we at the European Court of Auditors seek to make as much information about our work available to the public as possible, in a simple and easy-to-grasp format. In December, our institution issued an eye-opening report on public procurement in the EU, in which the auditors said that competition for public contracts had fallen over the last decade. What is more, we made a specific contribution to transparency by launching our very own public procurement dashboard. If you would like to know how your country or sector compares to others, why not give it a try?

Our special report found that fewer and fewer businesses competed to provide works, goods and services to public bodies between 2011 and 2021. One of our key recommendations was therefore that the European Commission should make better use of the available data to improve the situation. However, we found that the data on the contracts awarded was neither complete nor entirely accurate. The Commission’s monitoring tools also had shortcomings that made them less effective, and transparency suffered as a result.

Today, the EU executive’s Single Market Scoreboard still does not allow for proper trend analysis, nor show regional or sectoral differences. This is why we created a specific ECA public procurement dashboard and made it publicly available to the media, researchers and the general public. The interactive dashboard provides a handy comparison of trends in specific national markets of the 27 EU member states and key industries such as construction, energy, financial services and medical equipment.

For example, we found in our audit that there have been increasingly few direct awards for financial services since 2011, while the highest number of direct awards in 2021 were made in the energy sector. We also identified some countries as outliers in terms of single bidding (where there is only one company providing a bid) or direct awards (where the authorities approach one or a number of companies to submit a bid without issuing a public call for tender). Both practices are key performance indicators for competition in procurement, but have unfortunately been moving the wrong way over the last decade. Help us spot more trends with the use of our interactive dashboard. We are looking to the Commission and member state authorities to turn the tide and ensure more competition for some €2 trillion in public tenders each year. In turn, this should mean better value for taxpayers’ money across the EU.