Some of the information published online in the Public Procurement Bulletin (e.g. call for bids, tender results) is inaccurate. In cases when the Public Procurement Board (PPB) is informed about the error, for example by the issuer, a correction notice is published subsequently (e.g. rectification or modification) (regulations related to this are NFM 14/2010 [October 29th], and in NFM 92/2011 [December 30th]). Nevertheless, in some other cases, the original, incorrect announcement is published in full again, but with the corrected information. It is unclear why two approaches to corrections is used simultaneously.
Although the elimination of errors is necessary and a welcome approach, the ambiguous practices used by PPB raise a number of questions in terms of transparency and legal certainty. Uncertainty is mainly due to the fact that when correction notices, such as rectifications or modifications, are published with the original and the correction registry numbers, but they do not provide any information on the registry number of the corrected newly published full version if any. Thus, the corrected full document, even after a thorough search, cannot always be found.
This highlights the issue that the publication of the corrected full announcement is most likely not mandatory. In addition, a correction notice is not always published when the document has been corrected. As a consequence of the above, there can be no 100% certainty about whether the published information is the correct or incorrect version of an announcement, and whether a corrected full version is available or not when correction happened. This report describes these problems and procedures implemented to resolve them.
PDF (in Hungarian with English summary)