“White jobs” monitoring by representatives permitted

The Swedish Competition Authority has investigated whether the City of Malmö has complied with the procurement regulations when it used the “Vita jobb” (“White jobs”) model’s system for monitoring agreement compliance. As part of the model, a trade union performs some of the monitoring of the procured contract.

Monitoring and controlling that an agreement’s conditions are being met is an important task in the public procurement context.

Without monitoring, municipalities or other procuring agencies have no way of knowing that they have duly received that which has been agreed (upon) with the supplier. Routines for agreement monitoring should be par for the course, argues Swedish Competition Authority’s Director General Dan Sjöblom.

The Swedish Competition Authority has received complaints that the City of Malmö has hired a trade union to monitor agreements with its suppliers. The “Vita jobb” model that Malmö uses is based partly on a supplier undertaking to monitor certain specific contract conditions, and partly on monitoring and controlling that these conditions are met.

“The legal responsibility for monitoring agreements cannot be delegated. It is always the responsibility of the contracting authority. But there is nothing in the procurement rules that prevent the monitoring work being done by another party,” says Dan Sjöblom.

The procurement rules do not regulate the measures that supplier can take if it suspects that a certain representative is exceeding its powers or has proceeded inappropriately. Disputes regarding these kinds of issues can be settled via contractual law as the procurement is completed. The Swedish Competition Authority has no supervisory responsibility with regard to issues of contract law and has therefore closed the case.

Read the decision, dnr 171/2015 (in Swedish)