BG-703, BG-4; Consortia and information in eForms

The question is: how are consortia dealt with in eForms, and how do MS practically deal with it?

Groups of economic operators may participate in procurement procedures; they may not be required to have a specific legal form in order to be able to participate; they may (but don't have to) be required to do so once they have been awarded the contract (see e.g. Article 20 of Directive 2014/24/EU).

eForms do not explicitly consider the existence of such consortia except, from what I can tell, in BT-760; this means that eForms does not seem to place any particular requirements on CA in this regard, and it would generally be correct to conclude that adding information on just the consortium is okay, even though consortia can be ephemeral and also may "hide" the underlying companies.

It would be interesting to know how CA in different MS fill out the BG-703 on the organisation "winner" (and any other organisation that is on the economic operator side); BG-4 should also be relevant. The following options seem possible:

• The information is filled out only for the consortium - which may, for example, not have an identifier, its own address etc..
• The information is filled out providing only the tenderer leading the consortium (this can also be a mix, providing the name of the consortium and the information of the leading tenderer)?
• The information is filled out for all tenderers participating in the consortium (and possibly also separately filled out for the consortium)?

We have noted in particular that BG-703 does not allow some fields to be repeated, so as soon as information is required for all participating tenderers, this may be adding quite some administrative burden as the entire BG would need to be repeated; on the other hand, it can be an issue for transparency to not have information on all tenderers (though there again it is relevant to assess which information is really needed for which purposes).

We have also seen some contracting authorities putting in the name(information of the consortium and repeating only the unique ID field (adding unique identifiers of the members of the consortium), as this BT may be repeated.

And as a final note, it should be considered that consortia, as set out at the start, both may be required to take on a certain legal form - and they may assume one voluntarily. This may however only happen later than the 30-day deadline for CAN publication.

In terms of transparency/data reliability, this may be a wortwhile topic to look into, asking how MS deal with this? Is it possible for PPDS/TED to filter the existing data to see if there is an issue here?