The Federal Government sanctioned the New Bidding Law (Law n. 14.133/2021), designed to consolidate, modernize, and improve the Brazilian government procurement legal framework. It provided a two-year transition period to ensure adequate implementation across the three levels of government.
The Federal Government sanctioned the New Bidding Law (Law n. 14.133/2021), designed to consolidate the legal provisions of different government procurement systems and modernize the rules for public bidding. It also aims at improving the efficiency and transparency of government procurement, applicable to the three levels of government (federal, state, and municipal).
The new legal framework for government procurement, which is already in force and can be applied to new public biddings, will revoke Law n. 8.666/1993 (Bidding Law) and Law n. 10.520/2002 (Reverse Auction Law), and replace legal provisions of Law n. 12.462/2011 (Differentiated Procurement Regime), after a two-year transition period (see article 193), as a means to consolidate the provisions from those laws.
The new law also provided the development of a new national government procurement database, which will centralize information on all public biddings across the three levels of government, improving transparency.
As to the modernization of government procurement, the new law incorporated the Competitive Dialogue modality, applicable on specific cases. The law described five bidding modalities (article 28):
- Reverse Auction;
- Competition;
- Concourse;
- Auction; and
- Competitive Dialogue (newly incorporated modality).
Additionally, it provided six criteria for evaluating bidding proposals (article 33): lower price; biggest discount; best technique or artistic content; technique and price; biggest bid (in case of auctions); and largest economic return. It also provided the acceptance of guarantee insurances as collateral for selected contracts (article 96), and incorporated bidding irregularities to the Brazilian Criminal Code (article 178). Those provisions are designed to modernize and improve the efficiency of the Brazilian government procurement legal framework.
