Why you get disqualified: the most common mistakes that sink bids

There is a myth that lives in every company that has bid for a public tender: that it all comes down to price and connections. That if you are not the cheapest or have no “insider”, your chances are zero. The data says otherwise.

For this analysis we took nine of the most active bidders on the Electronic Public Procurement Platform — firms that, by number of submitted bids, are among the most prolific in the country, with over 7,100 bids across about three years. We then had a Bulgarian-specialised language model read hundreds of their evaluation reports — word by word, whole documents, including the illegibly scanned ones. The goal was a simple question: when these firms drop out, why do they drop out?

Of all the bids whose report we could read, about one in five ends in exclusion — the bid never reaches evaluation; it is thrown out on a technicality. And of those exclusions, nearly seven in ten are about documents and declarations.

The anatomy of an exclusion

Before the mistakes, it is worth understanding the difference between losing and being excluded — they are fundamentally different things.

To lose means your bid was reviewed, scored and simply ranked lower. Someone was better — cheaper, with higher methodology points. That is a fair loss. To be excluded means your bid never reached evaluation. It was thrown out at the door, on a technicality, before the committee saw what you actually offer. You can have the best price in the room and still drop out — because one declaration is missing or signed the wrong way.

This is the hidden tragedy of public procurement. A firm invests weeks of preparation, calculates an aggressive price, prepares a technical proposal — and loses it all to an omission that takes five minutes to avoid. Exclusion is the most expensive cheap mistake in the tender business.

#1: Documents — the silent killer

This is the category that sinks more bids than all the others combined. And the cruellest part is that almost none of these mistakes require skill — only attention. The typical ones, each a real ground for exclusion:

• Unfilled national databases in the ESPD — fields that seem trivial but are mandatory under Art. 67 of the Public Procurement Act.
• A declaration signed by hand and scanned instead of with a qualified electronic signature — the form of the signature defeats the content.
• An ESPD not signed by all legal representatives — one missing co-manager signature and the document is invalid.
• No translation of the technical specification for foreign-language products.
• A missing mandatory catalogue or brochure with the technical proposal.
• No indication of which information is a trade secret.

Notice the pattern: none of these is about the quality of the bid. Each is about the way it is formatted. A firm can be the best for the job and still drop out because it signed on the wrong line.

#2: The technical proposal — the devil is in the parameters

Second come technical non-compliances. The mistakes here are more substantive, but still a matter of preparation, not market power:

• No manufacturer, brand and model stated for offered equipment — the most common technical omission in supplies.
• A parameter that doesn’t meet the minimum requirement — scanner or computer specs that “don’t fully comply”.
• An unfilled mandatory “Proposal for performance” template.
• A price exceeding the maximum estimated value.
• An un-decrypted price bid — in one case a bidder failed to open their price bid in time and the committee unanimously proposed exclusion under Art. 107.

The lesson: the technical specification is read literally, not “in spirit”. The required quantity, capacity and parameter must be stated explicitly — implication is no defence.

#3: Experience and team — when the firm “on paper” falls short

Selection criteria are the third big group of traps. Here the firm may be perfectly capable, but fails to prove it the right way:

• An unmet requirement for at least three contracts of similar scope.
• An undocumented volume of delivery — e.g. a required 3,000 MWh over three years, not documented with volume and recipient.
• A missing one of three required technical staff.
• Missing certificates of professional experience for the site manager, the health-and-safety officer and the quality controller — a very common omission in construction tenders.

Here the mistake is rarely that the firm lacks the experience — it is that it didn’t submit the exact documents that prove it in the required format.

Why builders err more than traders

The exclusion rate is not the same for everyone.

The difference is entirely in documentation complexity. A construction tender requires a mountain of certificates — for staff, experience, build category, quality systems. The more mandatory documents, the more chances for a small mistake. Supplying toner cartridges or fuel needs far less paperwork — so formal exclusions there are rare, and the battle is settled fairly, on price.

The lesson is direct: the more document-heavy your market, the more resource you must put into compliance, not price.

Three stories from the reports

The first is a construction firm with a competitive price for a renovation, which got far in the procedure. It fell not on money, but because a safety-management certificate was missing; the committee gave a deadline to fix it, but the file was never put in order in time.

The second is an IT supplier with a technically solid bid. Excluded because manufacturer, brand and model were not stated for part of the equipment, and a specification translation was missing for foreign-language products.

The third is an energy trader who lost entirely fairly: it offered 18.75 BGN/MWh against the winner’s 8.27. No formal mistake — just more expensive. That is what a fair loss looks like, and it is rarer than many think.

The checklist that would have saved most bids

If we sum up all the real grounds for exclusion into one practical pre-submission check, it looks like this:

Not a single line on this list requires a better price, higher quality or connections. Each is a matter of discipline.

What to do with this

Treat documentation as a product, not a formality. The most common cause of loss is free to avoid — all it takes is attention and a checklist before every submission.

Don’t fear a low price — prepare its justification in advance. A low price rarely excludes you; it just demands a defence under Art. 72.

Read the specification literally. “Calendar” is not “working”. “Brand and model” means exactly brand and model.

If tenders were won only on price or connections, the small, honest firm would be powerless. But when the most common cause of failure is a document, fate returns to its own hands. In public procurement, more often than anything else, the winner is not the cheapest or the best-connected, but the most compliant.

This is exactly what our requirements ↔ documents check and declaration auto-fill incl. eEEDOP are for — so you stop losing tenders over the file.

— Analysis of open EOP data and automated reading of evaluation reports.