Tender Automation for Large Bids: The 4.57bn Rail Baltica Lesson

In large tender bids, offers in four tenders in Poland and Austria fell over a declaration, a capacity provider’s ESPD, a bid-bond file and a signature; none fell over price.

• Rail Baltica, 2026: KIO found negligence under Article 109(1)(10) of Poland’s Public Procurement Law (PZP), Krzysztof Brysiewicz wrote. The next selected offer fell on an appeal about improper self-cleaning, among other things, XYZ reported.
• S19 Jawornik–Lutcza, 2024: Kolin relied on Multiconsult Polska, whose ESPD left out a contract termination and a penalty. KIO 251/24 held that a bidder hands the buyer the facts and does not decide alone what to leave out.
• Warsaw trams, 2026: the guarantee and its annex were each signed, then merged into one file; six validation tools showed broken data integrity, so the signatures were invalid. KIO dismissed Škoda’s appeal (KIO 5860/25).
• ÖBB, Austria, 2021: the tender required a qualified electronic signature, and no EU agreement under eIDAS Article 14 covers Swiss ones, so Austria’s Federal Administrative Court (BVwG) voided the selection.

The cost reached the buyer. PKP PLK signed for PLN 4.084 billion net (PKP PLK, 2026). The press put the gap between offers above PLN 650 million (Inżynier Budownictwa, 2026), a press figure Brysiewicz did not verify on offer forms.

In each tender, the deciding document existed before the deadline.

In Poland, a missing document may be requested once; a tender rejected over an untrue declaration, a broken bid bond or an unclear guarantee cannot be saved later.

Directive 2014/24/EU, Article 56(3) lets a buyer ask for missing documents. It does not have to.

Rules differ between countries; confirm with your legal team.

Example: two valid signatures, one invalid file

Imagine a treasury team that receives a bank guarantee and, later, an annex, each with a qualified electronic signature. A coordinator merges both into one PDF for the upload. The buyer validates the file it received, not the originals, and the integrity check fails. In Poland, that bid security cannot be supplemented.

Upload the guarantee exactly as the bank issued it, then validate that exact file.

In every case on record, not the bid team: the facts sat with legal, with partners and capacity providers, with treasury and its bank or insurer, and with the signatory.

• Legal: fines, decisions and the opinion on whether they count (Rail Baltica).
• Partners and capacity providers: their own terminations and penalties (S19).
• Treasury, bank and insurer: the guarantee, its wording and its file (Starogard Gdański, Warsaw).
• Signatory: the certificate and its legal status (ÖBB).

The ESPD asks about facts and, under Article 59(1), covers every entity you rely on; the buyer decides what the facts mean. A “yes” does not exclude you automatically, KIO said in an earlier ruling, KIO 499/22, quoted in KIO 251/24. Under the CJEU’s C-395/18 Tim (2020), a subcontractor’s ground may exclude the bidder, never automatically.

KIO 251/24 also drew a limit: Multiconsult did not have to declare a delay penalty on a PKP PLK contract.

Whether a fact must be declared is a legal judgment. A person has to make it.

Estimation automation and AI for tenders save time on pricing and writing, but that kind of tender automation does not compare declarations, signatures and partner documents with records.

Tender automation for large bids should run five comparisons before every submission, each tied to a ruling where the gap it catches decided the outcome.

1. Pick one closed tender with partners and a guarantee.
2. Run the five comparisons against its records.
3. Hand each flag to the person who would have decided it.

The check reads registers through retrieval over your own records with MCP and RAG, like document checks in insurance claims automation.

The debate is open, and Mirbud welcomed it; under Polish law, however, the proportionality exception does not cover this ground.

KIO refused the Article 109(3) PZP exception, which does not cover point 10, Brysiewicz notes. The open route came before the deadline: disclosure with your own legal view, as Kancelaria Czerwiński recommends (2026), and self-cleaning under Article 57(6) where needed.

The proportionality debate may change the law; it cannot reopen your tender.