Testing the Mechanism on EU Public Procurement Legislation

Abstract

This paper presents the results of Work Package (WP) no. 10 of project Mechanisms for Assessing the Risk of Crime (MARC) consisting of a pilot study to test the Crime Risk Assessment Mechanism (CRAM) on European Union (EU) public procurement legislation. The research scope was restricted to Directive 2004/18/EC adopted by the European Parliament and the Council on 31 March 2004, which consolidates the previous directives in the same field. To this end, the research partners involved realised a survey of the literature, case study analysis and interviews, which highlighted the opportunities for economic/financial/organised crime inherent in specific items of EU public procurement legislation. Based on these inputs and sources, the researchers applied the CRAM to Directive 18/2004/EC and then developed a set of recommendations for better implementation of the methodology created in Project MARC. The exercise revealed some methodological difficulties with reference to the application of the CRAM in the pilot study. In particular, the following problematic aspects were revealed: the delta assessment (i.e. measurement of the differential in crime risk between the new and the old EU directives on procurement); the computational issues of the MARC formula (namely: elaboration of a synthetic Legislative Quality Index (LQI) and Market Vulnerability Index (MVI); reading LQI and MVI indicators not as separate entities but as linked together; risk that the same negative aspect of a legislative act may be double-counted under different indicators); the overlap between the MVI grids; and the content and wording of individual LQI/MVI indicators. The article concludes with a list of suggestions on how to repair these methodological shortcomings of the CRAM.