This Flagship Technical Support Project aims at building capacity in Member States to design and implement structural reforms in the field of public procurement and the fight against corruption. It targets Member States wishing to improve the professionalization of public buyers and to enhance their skills, knowledge and integrity. The proposed flagship project would provide support for assessing organisational structure and public procurement processes, for addressing training needs and career management of public procurement practitioners, as well as for developing tools to use strategic procurement methodologies, including in particular innovation procurement (e.g., green procurement criteria, e-procurement tools, guidelines, templates).

• Reinforced capacities in the Member States to run public procurement procedures effectively, including in relation to investments provided under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)
• Enhanced quality of public spending through increased use of strategic procurement methodologies, including innovation procurement and green procurement
• Contribution to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The overall objective of this flagship project is to strengthen administrative capacity in the Member States to effectively implement public procurement procedures. The flagship project can also improve the absorption of EU funds and the sound implementation of Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRPs), while providing opportunities for the Member States to learn and benefit from the experience of others.

This flagship project proposes four work packages, tailored to each Member State. The Member States may submit requests for one or more packages or combine them as appropriate.

• Review of current state of play of the organizational structure and public procurement processes with the purpose of identifying challenges and recommendations for the way forward based on benchmarking with international good practices
• Review of training needs and development of tailored training programmes and certification framework for procurement workforce based on ProcurCompEU in order to support and promote the professionalization of the procurement personnel
• Development of specific tools for the application of strategic procurement methodologies through the set-up of a working group focused on areas such as (green procurement; innovation procurement; agile procurement; social procurement)
• Enhancement of transparency, integrity and use of data through the development of electronic procurement systems, the set-up of publicly accessible contract registers, effective reporting mechanisms and the protection of whistle-blowers against the risk of retaliation

In the context of the mobilisation of unprecedented financial support from the RRF, it is crucial that technical support is available to reinforce the administrative capacity of Member States to run public procurement procedures effectively. Several Member States have included investments aimed at improving the quality of public administrations through the RRP. This flagship project will target capacity building of the public sector in a key area.

Furthermore, some Recovery and Resilience Plans specifically provide for milestones and targets related to comprehensive reforms to improve Member States' public procurement systems. More specifically, 10 RRPs aim to improve public procurement by developing electronic procurement or streamlining the awarding process.

TSI support to RRPs

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REFORM-B2ec [dot] europa [dot] eu (REFORM-B2[at]ec[dot]europa[dot]eu) and REFORM-01ec [dot] europa [dot] eu (REFORM-01[at]ec[dot]europa[dot]eu)