The Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) published the document “Cartel in Public Biddings – Warning Signs”, prepared in partnership with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and which seeks to provide information and instructions to help identify cartels in biddings.
Bidding cartels are coordinated practices between bidders that seek to artificially alter market conditions related to the bidding proceeding. In this sense, participants can set prices, combine results, among other practices that lead to prices increasing to be paid by the Public Administration, with a consequent waste of public resources.
Thus, the document prepared by Cade and the OECD intends to present itself as a checklist of attention points to be observed during public contracts, helping public agents to identify potential illegal coordinated practices.
In a didactic way, the document draws attention to suspicious behavior in the bid proposal and result stages. For example, the document indicates that warning signals should be turned on when bids are presented with identical prices but different from the notice’s reference value, when presenting bids with remote conditions to win, or even when there is a sudden and unjustified decrease in the number of participants in the bidding.
Once warning signs are identified, both other bidders and public agents can, in a confidential way, submit a complaint through Cade’s Denouncement Channel. Both the checklist and the Denouncement Channel can be easily found on Cade’s website.
