This Tuesday, the Government managed to obtain the parliamentary majority necessary to approve the 2023 budgets by obtaining the support of the PNV, Bildu and PDeCAT. A spending plan that includes the need to “urgently undertake the technological renewal” of the Public Sector Contracts Platform (PLACSP), the official portal in which public tenders and their results from virtually all institutions are published daily.
The Platform contains all contracts awarded since 2014, accessible free of charge (unlike other official databases, such as the Trade Register). It also allows companies to electronically submit to tender processes, request information or receive notifications about changes to tenders. But over the years, the portal has become a real IT nightmare, companies and transparency specialists denounce.
The Ministry of Finance and Civil Service, responsible for the portal, has built a gigantic infrastructure on technological foundations that were not designed to support the current volume of publications, consultations and communications. The result was a platform that can take up to 45 seconds to respond to a search for a certain file, offering results that vary depending on whether accents are typed or not, presenting the information in a way that is almost impossible to understand. to consult. a single source on a mobile phone or with links that self-destruct after two minutes, making it impossible to create an index of information for later consultation or sharing with third parties.
The government recognizes that the situation is untenable. “With the current technology infrastructure, it will be virtually impossible to cope while maintaining the levels of availability and performance demanded by different types of PLACSP users,” admitted in the draft 2023 Budget.
The risk is that the system will not be able to sustain the exponential growth it has experienced in recent years. If in 2018, 14,717 electronic procurement procedures were processed, in 2021, there were 182,735. The number of public bodies registered on the portal has doubled over the same period, from 10,000 to 20,000. Access to the Platform has tripled, from 13 million to 39. There are already more than 200 000 companies registered, users increased from 17,000 to more than 46,000.
A six-year project
Despite everything, the renovation will not be done all at once. “Considering the extent of the services that PLACSP offers to its users and taking into account the time spent in processing the various procurement files for the execution of the modernization, a horizon of 4 to 6 years is proposed for a renovation complete. », Detail sources from the Ministry of Finance to elDiario.es.
The department headed by María Jesús Montero refuses to reveal the budget the renovation will have for the same reason. “This is a multi-year action, as has been highlighted, so no precise figures can be committed at the moment. Yes, we can predict that this will be an amount that will make it possible to carry out the modernization with all the guarantees and in an efficient manner, avoiding the contracting bodies of the different administrations from having to acquire or develop, for example, their own systems electronic auctions,” they assure.
Currently, maintaining the Platform costs public coffers three million euros every two years. The traditional contractor performing the service is an IBM subsidiary.
Transparency
Even if one of the missions of the Contracting Platform is to make public tender processes more transparent and to allow online access to administrative documentation, the old technical infrastructure of the portal ends up causing exactly the opposite. “It is objectively ineffective and frustrating for civil servants, businesses and citizens alike,” denounced Jaime Gómez-Obregón, an ethical hacker specializing in public sector transparency.
“How many hours per year are we wasting, as a country, because of an inefficient and poorly designed portal? “What is the additional cost of having a massively used digital public service like the PLCSP in these unfortunate conditions?”, asked this engineer in one of his publications on the subject. In one of his analyzes of PLACSP, Gómez-Obregón detected that it took more than 45 seconds to resolve an information search that the British public procurement portal could satisfy in 7 seconds.
“The reality is that public tender platforms, due to the logical guarantee nature of the public sector, can be very cumbersome to use for people who are not used to this type of procedures,” explains Víctor Calvo-Sotelo, Managing Director of DigitalES. Spanish Association of Technology Companies. For this reason, he asks the government that “the training of institutional and professional users” is “also a priority” in the project.
“Experiences like that of the aid program of the Digital kit They show that it is possible to simplify and bring public calls for tender closer to small and medium-sized businesses, while retaining all the guarantees,” he adds.
The Ministry of Finance emphasizes that improving access to information will be one of the main objectives of the renovation, as well as the advice of experts in this field. “Preliminary consultations and public procurement procedures will be carried out. Concerning open data, they are updated periodically taking into account the requests of various organizations expert in transparency and open government,” they specify.
“The PLACSP transformation is planned taking into account current technological paradigms of software architecture, such as microservices. The use of prior market consultations is also planned to obtain information from expert companies on the design of certain functionalities and/or services,” add the same sources.
