Evaluation Report

An Evaluation Report is the authoritative record of how a contracting authority assessed competing tenders and reached its award decision. It serves three distinct purposes: internal governance (providing a defensible audit trail), transparency to unsuccessful bidders (enabling meaningful debriefs), and the evidential basis for any procurement challenge or review.

What is an Evaluation Report?

Article 84 of Directive 2014/24/EU requires contracting authorities to draw up a report for each procurement procedure. This report must cover at minimum:

• The name and address of the contracting authority and the contract subject matter and value
• The names of the candidates or tenderers admitted and the reasons for their admission
• The names of any candidates or tenderers rejected and the reasons for rejection
• The grounds for exclusion of any tenderer found to be in an abnormal situation (for example, abnormally low tender investigation)
• The name of the successful tenderer and the reasons for selecting it, including its advantages and characteristics relative to other tenders
• Where applicable, the reasons why the contracting authority decided not to award a contract

In practice, most contracting authorities produce an evaluation report that goes beyond these minimum legal requirements. A well-structured evaluation report will contain:

• The full evaluation matrix showing individual criterion scores for each bidder
• Scoring rationale for each criterion, typically at the level of the evaluation panel's moderated assessment
• A summary ranking of all compliant tenders
• An explanation of any non-compliant tenders or tenders excluded from the process
• An award recommendation signed off by the appropriate governance authority within the contracting organisation

The evaluation report is an internal document that is not automatically published. However, elements of it are disclosed during the debrief process. Under the UK Procurement Act 2023, contracting authorities must publish an assessment summary that includes the criteria applied, the score achieved by the winning bidder, and the score achieved by the requesting bidder, providing a level of transparency that goes beyond the EU directive minimum.

Why the Evaluation Report matters for bidders

The evaluation report is the source material for your debrief. The quality of the feedback you receive after an unsuccessful bid depends directly on the quality of the scoring rationale recorded in the evaluation report. Authorities that produce detailed criterion-level rationale can provide genuinely useful feedback. Authorities that record only numeric scores with no narrative justification can offer little beyond the number itself.

You are entitled to request a debrief. Under Article 55 of Directive 2014/24/EU, an unsuccessful tenderer who makes a written request within ten days of notification of the award decision must receive feedback on its tender within fifteen days. Use this entitlement: understanding precisely where your bid scored below the winner on each criterion is essential intelligence for future submissions.

If your debrief reveals that the evaluation report contains scores or reasoning that appears inconsistent with your submission, or that the scoring methodology was applied differently from how it was described in the procurement documents, the evaluation report is the document you will need to examine closely in any formal challenge.

Example

A Hungarian central government authority concludes a framework evaluation for legal services. The evaluation report records: six bidders submitted compliant tenders; two were rejected as non-compliant at the compliance check stage; four were scored against the award criteria. The report shows each bidder's score against each criterion, the panel's narrative rationale for each score, and the final ranking. Bidder B, ranked second overall, requests a debrief and receives the relevant sections of the evaluation report redacted to protect Bidder A's commercially sensitive information.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I obtain a copy of the full evaluation report?

Not as a matter of right in most European jurisdictions. Authorities will disclose the sections relevant to your own bid and the winning bid's scores. Commercially confidential information about other bidders will be redacted. In some member states, freedom of information legislation provides a broader right of access to public documents, but this is subject to exceptions for commercial confidentiality.

How long must an evaluation report be retained?

Article 84(2) of Directive 2014/24/EU requires that evaluation documentation is retained for at least three years from the date of contract award. Many authorities retain records for longer to support audit and accountability requirements.

What if the evaluation report contains errors?

If you identify what appears to be a scoring error in your debrief, raise it promptly with the contracting authority. Minor arithmetic errors can sometimes be corrected without reopening the evaluation. More substantive errors (misreading of tender content, application of wrong weighting) may require a formal evaluation review or, if not resolved, a procurement challenge before the appropriate national review body.