Digital Procurement, Supplier Verification and Data Transparency

Introduction

Every part of this series so far has covered a rule a buyer or bidder has to follow. This part covers the architecture that is supposed to make following those rules less repetitive — a single eligibility profile instead of a fresh compliance exercise for every tender, one data trail instead of twenty-seven incompatible ones, and a monitoring duty that treats fraud and collusion as something to actively watch for rather than discover after the fact.

Supplier Profile, Eligibility and Verification

The electronic eligibility service is the proposal's version of tell-us-once. A buyer specifies which exclusion grounds, selection criteria and origin requirements apply to a given procurement; an operator builds a single eligibility profile that a digital business credential tool can then use to verify those requirements automatically, rather than a bidder re-submitting the same certificates for every tender it enters¹. What is genuinely striking is that the Commission has not yet settled on which technology carries that credential. The delegated act implementing this article can draw on the forthcoming European Business Wallets — a parallel piece of legislation not yet finalised at the time this proposal was tabled — the existing Once-Only Technical System under the Single Digital Gateway Regulation, the eIDAS European Digital Identity Wallet, or a qualifying Member State service, in any combination¹. Whichever instrument or mix is chosen has to be technically live in every Member State by 30 June 2028¹. Underneath that sits the database-connection duty covered in Part 2 of this series — national criminal, tax, social security and…