Perfil del contratante (Spain) — the contracting authority profile

The perfil de contratante is the internet location at which a Spanish contracting body must publish everything relating to its contracting activity. It is not a supplier-facing 'buyer profile' page but a legally defined publication locus: under the LCSP, publication there is what makes a procurement act effective, and failure to publish can void the contract. Article 63 sets out a long, itemised minimum of what has to appear.

Not a "buyer profile"

English procurement vocabulary uses "buyer profile" for a description of an organisation — who it is, what it buys, how to reach it. The Spanish perfil de contratante is something else. Article 63.1 of Ley 9/2017 (LCSP) requires contracting bodies to disseminate their profile exclusively over the internet, as the element that groups together the information and documents relating to their contracting activity. How to reach the profile has to be stated in the pliegos and in every tender notice, without exception.

Access is free and requires no prior identification. Identification may be demanded only for personalised services attached to the profile — subscriptions, alerts, electronic communications, submitting offers. Everything published must be in open, reusable formats and must stay accessible for at least five years.

What must appear in it

Article 63.3 lists a minimum for each contract, and the list is far longer than an English "contract notice plus award notice" would suggest:

  • the memoria justificativa of the contract; for services, the report on insufficiency of the authority's own means; the justification of the procedure used whenever it is not open or restricted; the pliego de cláusulas administrativas particulares and the pliego de prescripciones técnicas, or equivalent documents; and the document approving the file;
  • the detailed subject matter, duration, presupuesto base de licitación and award amount including VAT;
  • prior information notices, tender notices, award and formalisation notices, modification notices and their justification, and design contest notices;
  • the media in which the contract was advertised, with links;
  • the number and identity of the bidders that took part, all the actas of the mesa de contratación (or, where no mesa acts, the corresponding resolutions), the report valuing any award criteria that depend on a value judgement, the reports on offers presumed abnormally low under art. 149.4, and in every case the award resolution.

Decisions not to award, withdrawal from the procedure, declarations that a procedure was deserted, the lodging of appeals and any resulting suspension must also be published. Article 63.5 adds annulled procedures and the composition of the mesa de contratación and of any experts committee — naming the post held by each member, with generic references to the department expressly forbidden.

Contratos menores are published at least quarterly, with the subject matter, duration, award amount including VAT and the identity of the awardee, ordered by awardee (art. 63.4). Contracts with an estimated value below €5,000 paid through a petty-cash advance system are exempt from that publication. In-house assignments above €50,000 excluding VAT are published as well (art. 63.6).

Why publication there is constitutive

The profile is not a courtesy copy. Article 347.5 provides that publication of notices and other contract information in a perfil de contratante produces the effects foreseen in the Law only when the profile is hosted on PLACSP or on a compliant regional information service. Article 39.2.c makes the absence of publication of the tender notice in such a profile — or in the Official Journal of the EU where required — a ground of full nullity of the contract.

The system that supports the profile must include a device capable of reliably proving the moment public dissemination began (art. 63.7). That time stamp is what fixes deadlines. Appeal periods for the special procurement appeal run from the day after publication in the profile (art. 50.1.a and b). For contracts not subject to harmonised regulation, the minimum period for submitting offers runs from publication of the tender notice in the profile (art. 156.6). The award resolution must be published in the profile within 15 days (art. 151.1) and formalisation within 15 days of the contract being perfected (art. 154.1).

The practical consequence for a bidder

Three things follow.

The profile is your evidence base, not just your alert source. Because the actas de la mesa, the valuation report for judgement-based criteria and the abnormally low offer reports must be published, you can normally reconstruct how a competitor's score was built without asking anyone. If those documents are missing, that absence is itself an argument.

The profile sets your clock. Work from the time stamp on the profile, not from the day you happened to see an aggregated listing on another site. Where a regional platform hosts the profile, that platform is the record that prevails in the event of a discrepancy with PLACSP (art. 347.3).

Missing publication is a ground, not a grievance. If a tender notice never appeared in a profile hosted on PLACSP or the applicable regional service, that is nullity under art. 39.2.c, with its own longer deadlines under art. 50.2 — 30 days from publication of the formalisation, or six months from formalisation otherwise.

One vocabulary warning. Much Spanish-language reference material still describes an "adjudicación provisional" followed by an "adjudicación definitiva". That two-step no longer exists in the LCSP. The current sequence is classification of offers and proposal (art. 150.1), a requirement to produce documents within ten working days (art. 150.2), award within five working days of receiving them (art. 150.3), and formalisation (art. 153).

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