We have spent the past months working through this problem with a Finnish contracting authority, reading real tender packages in the state they are in shortly before publication. This is what that work keeps showing.
A package, not a document
A tender package is not one document. It is a notice, a technical specification, a price form, a draft contract, an ESPD form and often twenty or more annexes, written by different people over several weeks, frequently reusing text from an earlier procurement. Each part is usually checked on its own. Almost nothing checks them against each other.
That is where the defects live. A requirement in the specification that no annex supports. A scoring table whose weights were adjusted in one document and not the other. A deadline that moved once and now appears in two versions. None of these are visible when reading a single file, and all of them are visible to a supplier who has lost and is looking for grounds.
The ones that survive internal review
The hardest group is not arithmetic or broken cross-references. It is the requirements that each look reasonable on their own: a suitability condition that quietly excludes suppliers from other member states, a turnover threshold above the statutory ceiling, a specification that describes one product closely enough to name it. Read one at a time, each is defensible. Read together, they narrow the field to a single vendor, and that is how they are read on appeal.
Publication is the point of no return
Once a call is published, the options narrow sharply. A correction means a corrigendum and usually an extended deadline. A substantive change to the requirements means re-running the competition, because the authority cannot alter what it asked for without giving every supplier the same information and the same time. A defect found after the award decision is no longer an editing problem at all.
The cost is measurable. An appeal to the Market Court costs a contracting authority EUR 30 000 to 80 000 and locks the procurement for roughly six months on average, even when the appeal is dismissed. The delay is often the larger loss: the service being procured does not start, and the existing contract is extended or the need goes unmet.
According to the Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy, 42 percent of confirmed procurement errors originate in the drafting phase, before anything is published. They are found later, when finding them is expensive, and they were all present at a point when fixing one would have cost an afternoon.
What we take from it
Procurement teams are not missing diligence. They are missing the read that no individual reviewer is positioned to do: the whole package at once, against itself, in the hours before it goes out. That is the gap we are working on with our partner authority, and we will write about what comes of it when there is something worth reporting.
