The 2012 Recommendation of the Council on Fighting Bid Rigging in Public Procurement recommends to governments to strive for public procurement procedures that are designed to promote competition and reduce the risk of bid rigging. Bid rigging, i.e. agreements between bidders to eliminate competition in the procurement process, thereby raising prices, lowering quality and/or restricting supply, is a major risk to the effectiveness and integrity of public procurement and deprives the public sector of genuine opportunities to achieve value for money. For this reason, the fight against bid rigging has become one of the enforcement priorities of competition authorities around the world. The OECD, through its Competition Committee, developed the Recommendation to consolidate OECD good practices and recommend specific steps to render public procurement processes competitive and free from collusion. The report shows that the Recommendation is widely used and is relevant for competition and public procurement entities alike. Experiences illustrate that the Recommendation has been instrumental in helping many competition authorities launch advocacy programmes and raise awareness of bid rigging risks, and has also supported the detection by procurement authorities of bid rigging cases. The Recommendation is often the basis on which national strategies on fighting bid rigging are based, helping public entities to design tenders that promote effective competition, and develop tools to detect bid rigging. The Recommendation has also provided the analytical framework for country-specific projects carried out by the OECD Secretariat in co-operation with national entities in Member and nonMember countries. These projects provided the opportunity to test the impact of applying the Recommendation in practice: more competitive procurements have enabled very significant cost savings. The report concludes that the Recommendation is relevant and continues to be a solid basis for better competition in procurement markets.
Fighting Bid Rigging in Public Procurement
Report on Implementing the OECD Recommendation