European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) is a self-declaration of the businesses' financial status, abilities and suitability for a public procurement procedure. It is available in all EU languages and used as a preliminary evidence of fulfilment of the conditions required in public procurement procedures across the EU. Thanks to the ESPD, the tenderers no longer have to provide full documentary evidence and different forms previously used in the EU procurement. Original copies of the evidences can later be requested only from the winning tenderer. This means a significant simplification of access to cross-border tendering opportunities.
In line with the new Directives on Public Procurement, the ESPD was adopted by an implementing act in 2015. From October 2018 onwards the ESPD shall be provided exclusively in an electronic form.
There are four possibilities of using the electronic ESPD:
- Free web service provided by the European Commission for the buyers, bidders and other parties interested in filling in the ESPD electronically. The online form can be filled in, printed and then sent to the buyer together with the rest of the bid. If the procedure is run electronically, the ESPD can be exported, stored and submitted electronically. The ESPD provided in a previous public procurement procedure can be reused as long as the information remains correct. Bidders may be excluded from the procedure or be subject to prosecution if the information in the ESPD is seriously misrepresented, withheld or cannot be complemented with supporting documents.
- ESPD data model, which enables integration of the eESPD service into national e-procurement solutions/pre-qualification services. The semantic data model is aligned with CEN/BII and e-SENS. Solution providers can reuse the code and extend it according to their needs in order to provide additional value to the users.
- Open source version of the first option, i.e. of the eESPD service. The open source version is compatible with the ESPD data model and some elements can be adjusted to take into account national needs.
- Virtual Company Dossier (VCD) of e-SENS, which allows the buyers to handle the eESPDs (like the first option) and the tenderers to benefit from an automated filling-in of the eESPD.
Learn more about ESPD
The e-SENS implementation of the electronic ESPD
e-SENS has released the sample software implementation of the Virtual Company Dossier (VCD), which can be used to implement the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD).
The e-SENS implementation consists of a set of libraries, the ESPD/VCD framework, that facilitates the creation, import, export and validation of all the supported ESPD document artifacts and a fully implemented service, the ESPD/VCD Designer, which leverages the framework functionality and can be deployed and used as a standalone ESPD web application for the creating and handling ESPD and VCD Artifacts. Both the ESPD/VCD Framework and the ESPD/VCD Designer are fully compatible and interoperable with the official EC ESPD Service.
The e-SENS VCD/ESPD implementation is intended to support the creation of artifacts needed for the qualification procedures in pre-award, awarding and post-award processes that involve any Economic Operator and any Contracting Authority in any European country. The VCD System, based on the VCD BIS, provides an interoperable implementation based on the specifications of qualification procedures in online public procurement within the European Union (EU) in accordance with the EU directives 2014/23/EU, 2014/24/EU and 2014/25/EU. Thereby, it supports the Economic Operators (EOs) in:
1. creating a self-declaration (the European Single Procurement Document - ESPD) to assert along tendering the Economic Operator's formal qualification via the exclusion grounds and selection criteria issued by the Contracting Authority,
2. assembling into an electronic package the evidences required for demonstrating a proof of the EO's formal qualification and capabilities (Virtual Company Dossier - VCD) along tendering, awarding and post-awarding procedures,
3. supporting communication between Economic Operators collaborating in consortia along tendering and procurement procedures to assemble the relevant qualification documents (ESPD or VCD), and
4. submitting the ESPD or VCD electronically to the Contracting Authority via the e-SENS e-Delivery infrastructure.
Read more about the VCD on JoinUp
Access the Software code for the release here
Access framework documentation here
ESPD and e-CERTIS
The ESPD service is integrated with e-Certis - a mapping tool used to identify and compare certificates requested in public procurement procedures across the EU. It helps to understand what evidence is requested or provided by the other party. The search function is supported in any of the EU languages.
Access e-Certis here