Hundreds or thousands of public contract award minutes have ceased to be available in recent days on the Public Procurement Platform (PLACSP), the official portal which publishes daily calls for tenders from a majority of public institutions in Spain. The disappearance of information has been massive and this has been confirmed by elDiario.es, in a problem that even affects the contracts awarded this year. The Ministry of Finance, responsible for this website, assures that this is a specific event which will be resolved soon and is due to an “update” of this tool. He also refuses to specify how many contracts this could affect.
This Friday, the platform announced a “temporary interruption” of the service “for maintenance tasks, on Monday September 30 between approximately 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.”. The shutdown, confirmed by the Treasury, was timed to remedy this situation. “All documents will be visible again because none were lost.”
The ministry admitted Thursday, when questioned by this newspaper, that “there are several public documents which are not visible, but which have not disappeared. “They are always present in the infrastructure with their timestamp, which guarantees both their integrity and authenticity. »
He attributes it to “a technological update of the logical architecture of the Platform. One of the elements that has been replaced recently is the repository in which public documents are stored. This sometimes resulted in some documents being migrated as not visible. “These documents have not been lost and they will be recovered,” insisted the Treasury, without specifying a deadline.
To the question of whether instead of “a few documents” there were thousands of documents, the ministry did not answer.
The minutes include, among other data, the date and place of award of contracts, those responsible for this decision and the criteria used for its adoption. The National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) generally collects them as proof of possible irregularities in its files. Not publishing them violates Article 63 of the Public Procurement Act, which requires keeping all contractual information in contractor profiles for at least five years, including “all minutes of the tender table.” contracts linked to the award procedure”.
Everything indicates that this problem affects a massive number of calls for tenders, but not those published in recent weeks. This Friday, during a random consultation of around a hundred formalization or allocation minutes, elDiario.es was only able to access around 10% of the documents.
This happened with contracts awarded in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 or even this same year. In all cases, the response from the website was the same when trying to download the report: “The requested document is not available because the advertisement which contains it has been canceled by the client or the offer has been archived by an administrator,” the platform told the user.
The problem affected very different administrations and different dates: contracts awarded to the Galician businessman César Blanco (former head of the PP of Ourense who received rewards and subsidies for almost 100 million); to multimillion-dollar emergency orders from the Department of Health to purchase masks and gloves or respirators in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic; to the multi-million dollar contract awarded a year ago by Madrid City Hall for the construction of the Santiago Bernabéu car park, estimated at more than 600 million…
Artificial intelligence
This outage comes at a time when the CNMC is using artificial intelligence tools through its economic intelligence unit to detect possible signs of collusion in public calls for tenders and carry out preventive actions. He does it “with very good results,” he said a few days ago. the president of this organizationCani Fernández, during a speech in Congress during which he recalled the importance of competition in this activity, which can represent 20% of GDP.
The regulator’s Competition Department recalled this Friday that “the CNMC is not responsible for the management or operation of the State contracts platform, we therefore do not have the authority to determine its operation. However, at CNMC we periodically download this database and store the information on our own servers. Therefore, our database should not be affected by issues on the original platform.
The state platform contains all contracts awarded since 2014, accessible free of charge, unlike other official databases, such as the Commercial Register, whose information is paid for in Spain, unlike what happens in other countries such as Luxembourg.
The website allows companies to electronically submit to tender processes, request information or receive notifications about changes to tenders. However, over the years it has become a computing nightmare.
If in 2018, 82,179 contract awards were published there, in 2023, this figure was more than double, or 198,967. The economic volume of contracts awarded since 2018 reaches 360 billion euros excluding taxes, which represents approximately 36% of Spanish GDP in one year. In recent years, more than a million contracts have been published on this site, so it is not unreasonable that today tens of thousands of minutes are no longer accessible after this “update”.
The Treasury built a gigantic infrastructure on technological foundations that were not designed to support the current volume of publications, consultations and communications.
The result is that the platform can take 45 seconds to respond to a search for a given file, offering results that vary depending on whether accents are entered or not, or presenting the information in a way that is almost impossible to view from a mobile. phone or with links that self-destruct after two minutes. This makes it impossible to create an index of the information for later consultation or sharing with third parties.
The latest “update” of this site and this massive disappearance of documents comes after the 2023 budgets approved in November 2022 provided for a position, the amount of which the Treasury did not specify, to “urgently undertake technological renewal” of the obsolete platform. , in a project with a horizon of 4-6 years to carry out a “complete renovation”.
The website reports to the General Directorate of Heritage of the Ministry of Finance, and more particularly to the General Sub-Directorate for the Coordination of Electronic Markets. And it has been repeatedly criticized by businesses and transparency experts for the difficulties it imposes in accessing public tender data.
“Very opaque”
“They are very opaque, they are very old,” summarizes Manuel García, data engineer and public procurement expert, who detected cases of calls for tenders that included the names of the winners in the specifications. This Friday, the minutes of several of these contracts had disappeared.
Regardless of this incident which the Treasury promises to resolve, it is still impossible today for a citizen to search on this site for something as basic as the contracts awarded to a certain CIF, the code which uniquely identifies a company in Spain. This is only possible through the company name. This sometimes gives very imprecise results, in case of coincidence with another company name.
They have long allowed CIF to search for autonomous platforms such as those of Catalonia, the Comunitat Valenciana or the Community of Madrid. Others are even more opaque than that of the State and do not allow you to search even by the name of the successful bidder. This is the case, for example, of that of the Xunta de Galicia.
In 2022, the Government recognized that the technological architecture of the platform was not sustainable. “With the current technological infrastructure, it will be virtually impossible to maintain the levels of availability and performance demanded by the different types of PLACSP users,” he admitted in the 2023 draft budget.
The risk was that the system would not be able to sustain the exponential growth it had experienced. Two years later, this continues to be a problem, in a country that is one of the few Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries to have not yet approved a national anti-corruption strategy, in where public procurement should be key. The deadline for finalizing this document, requested among others by organizations such as the Court of Auditors, expired a few weeks ago.
