La nuova dimensione degli acquisti. Riflessioni sull'innovazione della Pubblica Amministrazione

This thesis intends to be a critical reflection on the digitization of the acquisition procedures of goods and services, which European policies are aimed to facilitate in order to foster economic revival on both the national and the Community level. Many different reasons make us wonder if it isn't appropriate to introduce a digitized public tender procedure in national and Community legislation. The Community’s economic and cultural policies have influenced national legislation by steering them towards the creation of an organic and unified set of rules for public tender. Specifically, economic goals such as the realization of a Single Market based on the principle of competition, can be considered essential with regard to acquisition of goods and services. As a matter of fact, the EU policies are intended to identify public tender as a strategic means for market revival and renewed competitiveness between enterprises, so to have a positive effect on the current economic crisis. Given the amount of financial resources connected to the Public Procurement Code, it is the economic crisis itself that calls for rationalization of public expenditure on acquisitions, which has been an ever more consolidated policy in the past few years, also by national government. This essay will focus on the growing importance of the Community, in particular on its economic policy and its influence over national regulations. The pursuit of the primary objective of European policies - the realization of a Single Market - is the decisive factor in the shift in function of contemporary public tendering from an exclusively national economic matter into a strategic means for the competitiveness of enterprises in the Single Market. This new function and its subsequent use in the public procurement in a broader framework are major factors in undermining the Italian traditional acquisition procedures which identifies the local authority as the fundamental body for the procurement procedures. The change from local to global perspective made it necessary to reflect on the convenience of an evolution in the acquisition dynamics developed in the late 2000s. In fact, faced with the same economic problems and urged on by the EU, the Italian government has established a centralized digital purchasing system, the Consip model of 3 the electronic market, which has been able to provide an immediate response to the issue of expenditure rationalization by streamlining and simplifying procedures. Through the development of the information society, the European Union points at building a renewed relationship between institutions and citizens, based on the exchange of data in a new perspective of collaboration and simplification of procedures. The need to coordinate the technological tools with traditional institutions of administrative law implies the need to modernize the previous administrative structure both in terms of technological means and in terms of computer literacy for the operators. To this effect the Italian government has established appropriate institutions such as the AIPA, DigitPa and, most recently, the Agency for digital Italy. The mere creation of a digitized administration in which digital technologies are not only a support tool, but also a way to coordinate and redefine the administration itself, requires the analysis of its underlying principles and of some institutions of the administrative digitization procedure. Though the CONSIP system and the electronic market are generally considered to be acquisition procedures, they can't be traced back to the classical notion of administrative procedure. For this reason the analysis of the principles on which the digital administration is based has led us to reflect on their possible application to the procedure of public tender. Given the specific nature of the purchasing process it would be superfluous to create a new set of rules specifically for public tendering, as it can be covered by the current regulation of the digital administration. So even if at first glance there don't seem to exist specific guidelines for the digitization of the acquisition procedures, these can be deducted from the existing regulations of the industry and the Digital Administration Code (DAC). Furthermore, the development of a completely digitized procedure would allow us to better respond to economic needs in the current time of crisis. Technological tools not only save time and money, they can also open the market to more competitors, ultimately resulting in national and global economic revival. This revival will also result from a reduction of the type corruption that is typical of public tender, because the use of a digital procedure will render the expenditure of public money more transparent and easier to control.