„Cassa sconto – discount on price offered in case of payment that is earlier than the one predicted in contract, cannot be prescribed as element of criteria for economically most advantageous bid, as it represents discount on offered price which is forbidden by provisions of Article 3 Paragraph 1 Point 34 of Public Procurement Law.

Explanation:

Article 3 Paragraph 1 Point 34 of Public Procurement Law (“Official Gazette of Republic of Serbia” no. 124/12; hereinafter: PPL) prescribes that discount on offered price is a method to determine the price that bidder may offer only when subject of public procurement procedure is subdivided into several lots, but contracting authority cannot prescribe such a method as element of the criteria in the tender documents.

When choosing elements of criteria of economically most advantageous bid in accordance with the Article 85 Paragraph 2 of PPL, contracting authority must also take into consideration the legal restriction from the quoted Article 3 Paragraph 1 Point 34 of PPL. Namely, discount on offered price as method to establish the price cannot be predicted in tender documents as element of criteria of economically most advantageous bid. As “cassa sconto” represents discount to the offered price calculated in proportion to the value of goods and is approved if the customer pays earlier than initially planned, it ensues that “cassa sconto” in essence is discount on offered price. The methodology of assigning points to such element of criteria couldn’t be objectively verified, which is explicitly demanded in Article 84 Paragraph 3 of PPL, as it wouldn’t be possible to establish when the actual payment for the goods delivered would take place, and therefore how many per cents should be realistically taken into consideration at assigning the points. Therefore the contracting authority would be assigning points without knowing if and when the situation would occur (payment earlier than initially agreed upon).

Besides all this, Republic Commission points out that the idea of forbidding discount on offered price as element of criteria means that proportionate value of discount has no meaning if seen apart from the value of price to which it relates. This way certain bidder could get more points for proportionately higher discount, although if you take into consideration the offered price and the discount, the price with the discount would still be higher than the price of the bidder that offered proportionally lower discount, and this bidder would get less points for the lower discount.

As Article 3 Paragraph 1 Point 34 of PPL explicitly states that contracting authority cannot prescribe discount to the offered price as element of criteria for the economically most advantageous bid, we can conclude that if contracting authority establishes element of criteria “cassa sconto” – as discount on the offered price in case of payment earlier than agreed upon, it would violate the quoted provision of the law.