Documentation
Background
There are a number of cases where there may be costs to access documents for, or to participate within, a tender process.
Potential bidders will want to be aware of the fees that a process might involve.
Procurement monitors may wish to ensure that participation fees are within legal parameters (often set as a fixed maximum, or a percentage of total contract value), or to monitor how participation fees are being used.
Extension fields
This extension adds a participationFees
field to the tender
section of OCDS and introduces a new participationFee
building block.
The participationFees
field is an array of participationFee
building blocks.
The participationFee
building block is made up of three fields:
type
- a value from theparticipationFeeType
codelist, describing the type of the feevalue
- the amount and currency of the feedescription
- an optional field with more information on the fee requirements. For example, sometimes a document fee is only applicable to the hard copy of the documents.methodOfPayment
- an optional field providing information on methods of payment accepted for the documentation. This is currently an array of strings, but an open codelist may be introduced in future.
Extension codelists
This extension adds closed participationFeeType
codelist with the following codes:
- document - a fee payable for access to bidding documents
- deposit - a refundable fee payable for the submission of bids
- submission - a non-refundable fee payable for the submission of bids
- win - a fee payable by the winning bidder
Example
The following JSON snippet models a contracting process where fees are applicable for both access to documents and submission of bids:
{
"tender": {
"participationFees": [
{
"type": "document",
"value": {
"currency": "GBP",
"amount": 8.00
},
"description": "Fee payable for both soft and hard copies of documents.",
"methodOfPayment":["electronic","cheque"]
},
{
"type": ["submission"],
"value": {
"currency": "GBP",
"amount": 10.00
},
"description": "Fee payable within e-procurement system.",
"methodOfPayment":["electronic"]
}
]
}
}
Usage notes
In some cases, a fee may be levied for 'official copies' of procurement documents (although copies may also be available freely online), and bidders required to prove they have paid for an official copy of the documents as part of their submission.
In this case, the fee should be modelled as a submission fee, as submission is only possible when this document access fee has been paid.
Issues
Report issues for this extension in the ocds-extensions repository, putting the extension's name in the issue's title.
Changelog
v1.1.4
- Update
mergeStrategy
property towholeListMerge
property - Update extension.json for Extension Explorer
v1.1.3
- Disallow
ParticipationFee.type
from having null in its array of strings - Allow
ParticipationFee.description
to be null - Add
ParticipationFee.id
field - Add description to
ParticipationFee
- Add title and description to
ParticipationFee.value
- Add participationFeeType.csv codelist for
ParticipationFee.type
- Add tests and tidy code