Abstract

The basic procedure is a new way of awarding public contracts with a value not exceeding the EU thresholds. There are no particular conditions that have to be met in order to implement it. This procedure has replaced all the previous procedures with an announcement (open tender, restricted negotiations with an announcement and competitive dialogue). The basic procedure is not uniform. In fact, there are (both in terms of construction and practicality) three separate procedures referred to by a common term. The scale of differences between these procedures makes it difficult to treat them as minor “variations” of the same procedure and leads to a call for necessary legislative changes in order to separate them from each other. The solutions adopted in the basic procedure, which in many cases depend on the contracting authority’s discretion and do not require that the manner of using a specific legal institution be specified in the contract announcement, pose a risk of the procedure being seen as non-transparent, although it is certainly true that they create a flexible mechanism for conducting the contract award procedure.