How to Set Up a French Public Procurement Watch ?
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Publicity Rules
In France, the Public Procurement Code (hereinafter "PPC") governs the rules for advertising consultation procedures launched by public purchasers, based particularly on the value of the procurement needs. Above certain thresholds, opportunities become identifiable for economic actors, provided that they set up appropriate monitoring mechanisms.
Except for certain sectors or specific cases, the main publicity rules are as follows:
- For needs estimated between €0 and €40,000 excluding VAT, no publicity or competition is required (Article R. 2122-8 of the PPC);
- For needs estimated between €40,000 and €90,000 excluding VAT, the modalities of publicity are freely adapted based on the market's characteristics, such as its value and the nature of the works, supplies, or services (Article R. 2131-12 of the CCP). In such cases, publicity does not necessarily mean publication, and there are situations where these contracts can be awarded without any formal publication;
- For needs equal to or above €90,000 excluding VAT and below formal procedure thresholds**, publicity is regulated. A market notice must be prepared according to a standard model and published in the BOAMP (French Public Procurement Bulletin) or a legal announcement journal (Article R. 2131-12 of the PPC). The formal procedure thresholds vary based on the sector or service and the type of purchaser:
- For the State and its public establishments (other than those with industrial and commercial activities), contracts above €143,000 excluding VAT for supply and service contracts;
- For local authorities, their public establishments, and their groupings, contracts above €221,000 excluding VAT for supply and service contracts;
- For both State and local authorities, contracts above €5,538,000 excluding VAT for works and concession contracts.
- Above these thresholds, the procedure becomes formalized, with a mandatory publication in the BOAMP and the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) on the TED Europe platform (Article R. 2131-16 of the PPC).
Thus, in theory, any consultation over €90,000 is identifiable in France. This is particularly true for procedures where the estimated value of the requirement is equal to or greater than the thresholds for formalized procedures (see above), as these must be published in the BOAMP and the OJEU.
However, for consultations between €40,000 and €90,000 excluding VAT, they may be published either in a legal announcement journal or on a purchasing platform, making it necessary to monitor all purchasing profiles and legal announcement journals.
Buyer Profiles
A buyer profile enables the complete digitization of public procurement procedures. Defined by Article R. 2132-3 of the PPC as follows: "The buyer profile is the dematerialization platform allowing purchasers to make consultation documents available to economic operators electronically and to receive electronic submissions from candidates and bidders. A ministerial decree sets the minimum functionalities and requirements for buyer profiles."
The goal is to eliminate paper-based procedures, enhance efficiency, and ensure widespread accessibility to public procurement for all interested actors. Subject to fulfilling the functionalities stipulated in the CCP, a purchaser has several options for setting up a buyer profile. They can either develop a platform in-house, using their own resources, or develop such a platform with other local authorities (known as a shared platform), or acquire or lease a platform or dematerialization service from a service provider.
If the minimum functionalities and requirements of the PPC are not met, the website does not qualify as a buyer profile. The difficulty is that there are thousands of different buyer profiles.
While the State has made efforts to centralize with a unique profile (e.g., PLACE platform), this is not the case for most local authorities and their groupings. Some have opted for shared platforms (e.g., MEGALIS for the Brittany region), while others have their own platforms. Faced with the plurality of this offer, a vigilant economic operator will necessarily have to monitor each of the buyer profiles in order to have an exhaustive watch on public procurement.
The following conclusions can be drawn from this context. In theory, a company targeting public contracts launched by local authorities in the Brittany region would not need to monitor the websites of public purchasers in this region, but could limit itself to monitoring the MEGALIS site, where consultations are pooled. On the other hand, the difficulty is very real for local authorities for whom there is no shared buyer profile. In the case of local authorities, the larger they are (and therefore the greater their volume of consultations), the more likely they are to create their own platform. For example, the cities of Marseille and Lyon, and the vast majority of France's twenty largest cities, will tend to publish their tenders on their own specially-created platforms, rather than on a shared platform. Smaller towns, on the other hand, rarely set up their own dematerialization platform, preferring to use a shared platform, whether set up by a larger local authority or purchased from a service provider.
Legal Announcement Journals (LAJ)
Public consultations below the formal procedure thresholds must be published either in the BOAMP or a LAJ. A LAJ is a journal authorized to publish legally required announcements. The prefecture annually establishes a list of these journals in each department.
A thorough public procurement watch should cover all LAJs, which number 471 according to the latest consolidated list from the prefectures. Examples include:
Summary
To thoroughly cover a specific area, one must set up a systematic watch on:
- Legal announcement journals for local, national, and European dissemination (BOAMP, OJEU, LAJ);
- Shared digital platforms for local, national, and European dissemination;
- Purchasing profiles of public entities of various sizes.
Even on a limited territory, comprehensive public procurement monitoring requires following hundreds of different sources. Simply tracking the TED Europe, BOAMP, and a few national platforms will not provide an exhaustive view.
It's important to note that the above rules and recommendations apply only to consultations subject to publicity rules. In fact, calls for expressions of interest, which are of great interest to solar developers, for example, or calls for projects, are not, in principle, subject to any advertising rules. As a result, calls for expressions of interest are often only published on the local authority's own website, and require even greater vigilance, since there are very few shared solutions in this field, and each of the 36,000 French communes can potentially publish a call for expressions of interest on its own website.
Read the article on calls for expressions of interest.
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