Luxembourg should strengthen public-procurement support for ministries and administrations before the next crisis, MPs have concluded after a Court of Auditors review of the Covid-era large-scale testing programme.

The Chamber’s budgetary execution committee unanimously adopted its report on the audit on Monday afternoon, after co-rapporteurs Sam Tanson and Stéphanie Weydert presented their conclusions on dossier 8755, the committee’s orientation debate on the Court of Auditors’ special report into spending generated by large-scale testing.

“We were really in an extraordinary situation,” Tanson, the déi Gréng co-rapporteur, said in an interview. But that did not excuse the lack of transparency or the failure to respect some procedures, she said.

The Court of Auditors did not find that large-scale testing exceeded its approved budget envelopes. But it criticised the way the programme was documented, contracted, monitored and reported to parliament, turning one of Luxembourg’s most visible pandemic measures into a broader test of how public authorities handle emergency contracts.

Lessons in urgency

The committee’s report recognises the need to act urgently during the pandemic, save lives and detect positive cases. It also notes that large-scale testing had been positively assessed internationally.

But the report also points to the sizing of the testing infrastructure, gaps in data, the treatment of costs, the handling of public contracts, the follow-up of key performance indicators and the cooperation between ministries and the Court of Auditors.

One of its clearest conclusions concerns public procurement. Luxembourg should develop more centralised expertise in public contracts, especially in crisis situations, because not every ministry has the necessary knowledge in what is a specialised area, Tanson told the committee.

“This is much more a structural problem,” Tanson said in the interview, arguing that the weaknesses exposed by the audit were not only crisis-related. Crises made the issue more visible, but “you don’t have in every ministry all the necessary expertise” to manage complex procurement procedures, she said.

The report recommends better training for ministries and administrations on their obligations under public-procurement law and the creation of a support and advisory service for public bodies seeking external service providers. In wording sent separately after the interview, Tanson said the committee considered it essential that all public bodies likely to act as contracting authorities have the expertise needed to award public contracts properly.

CSV co-rapporteur Weydert made a similar point in an interview, saying she had been struck by the suggestion that ministries outside the public works ministry may lack the ability to award public contracts properly. Public authorities may need a crisis “playbook” setting out how officials should coordinate when urgent decisions have to be taken, she said.

A single provider

Some of the Court of Auditors’ findings troubled Weydert because they pointed to weak spending controls. “If you commit such sums, you need procedures in place to follow where things stand,” she said, referring to the first and second phases of large-scale testing.

Laboratoires Réunis’ early position remains one of the file’s politically exposed points. “Laboratoires Réunis had really an advantage from the beginning,” Weydert said, because the laboratory was treated as the provider able to deliver the programme.

The pandemic was an extraordinary situation, she said, but the claim that only one provider could do the work still needed to be justified. “How can you make such a claim if you don’t have any objective reasons?” Weydert asked.

A proper negotiation process could still have been followed despite the urgency and short deadlines, she said. In a crisis, she added, “there should be red lines” over what cannot be crossed.

Piraten MP Sven Clement also focused on the effect of the government’s procurement choices. “It doesn’t mean that you can simply ignore the basics,” he said of the emergency context.

Clement described the price negotiations as “nonchalant, to say the least”. Asked whether he stood by that word, he replied: “I stand by it.”

The phase-three test

Phase three is where Clement sees the emergency argument breaking down most clearly. “The emergency justification cannot be used in phase three anymore,” he said.

The emergency justification was already weak in phase two, Clement argued. By phase three, the later lack-of-competition argument was partly the government’s own doing, because the earlier procurement approach had already left one operator in a decisive position.

During Monday’s committee meeting, Weydert also said the emergency context was real and that decisions had to be taken quickly. But the officials involved should perhaps have taken the necessary time to speak again to all relevant parties rather than immediately focusing on one provider, she said.

Parliamentary access to financial information became another fault line. Tanson told the committee that the phase-two bill had no financial sheet, while provisional figures for phase two and figures for phase one had been requested but not provided. The committee concluded that the Chamber had been deprived of important information.

For Clement, the lasting issue is procurement and transparency. The committee was right to keep its work focused on budgetary and financial execution and to acknowledge the crisis context honestly, he said, but the main lesson is institutional: better procurement support, clearer contract rules and a firm line on parliament’s information rights.

After the audit

“Luxembourg should create a cross-ministry public-procurement body,” Clement said, adding that this should not be limited to emergencies. Ministries and administrations have repeatedly struggled to apply procurement rules properly, he argued, pointing also to the committee’s separate report on public establishments.

A commission of enquiry into large-scale testing alone would probably go too far, Clement said, because neither the Court of Auditors nor the parliamentary report concluded that there had been criminal intent. But he said a broader special committee should still examine the Covid crisis as a whole, including vaccine procurement.

The report’s findings also point to future crisis planning. Mechanisms should be put in place in good time, Weydert told the committee, so spending can later be traced transparently and taxpayers can know where public money has gone.

DP MP Gérard Schockmel declined to make a personal statement before the committee discussion. In a written reply, he said the report reflected earlier committee discussions and was meant to provide a circumspect and balanced review of the three phases of large-scale testing.

The report’s adoption does not close the political debate. It moves the file from the Court of Auditors’ findings into a broader parliamentary discussion on whether Luxembourg needs stronger procedures before the next emergency, including more central procurement support, clearer contract controls and stricter protection of the Chamber’s right to financial information.