Selection criteria (Eignungskriterien)
also: selection criteria · qualification criteria · Eignungskriterien
Selection criteria (German: Eignungskriterien) are the requirements by which a contracting authority establishes whether a company is technically, financially and legally capable of performing the contract. They may cover only three areas: suitability to pursue the professional activity, economic and financial standing, and technical and professional ability. They must relate to the subject matter of the contract and be proportionate to it — and they are strictly separate from the award criteria: selection decides who may bid, the award decides which bid wins.
50,950 notices in our corpus carry structured, machine-readable selection criteria. Among the open procedures, 1,427 require or name an ISO 9001 certification and 638 an ISO 14001.
What it means for a bidder
In practice the same evidence recurs behind those three areas: entry in a professional or commercial register, tax and social-security clearance certificates, public liability insurance with a minimum sum insured, a minimum annual turnover — under EU law generally capped at twice the estimated contract value — comparable references from the last three or five years, details of the personnel to be deployed, and management-system certificates such as ISO 9001 or ISO 14001.
Two levers are rarely used by mid-sized firms. The first is relying on the capacities of other entities: a company may rely on another firm's resources, including firms outside its own group, provided it proves that those resources will actually be available; for turnover and balance-sheet figures the authority may require joint and several liability. The second is the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD): above the thresholds a self-declaration is enough at first, and the full evidence is requested only from the bidder in line for the award. Collecting every certificate up front costs time; filling in the self-declaration carelessly costs the contract.
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Related terms
DEFINITION · a description of the law with a citation, not legal advice · FIGURE · from nightly-built aggregates of our own corpus · all terms: friedrich-clement.com/en/glossar