Post-Contractual Behaviour of Public Contracting Authorities in the Slovak Republic

The purpose of this article is to analyse the post-contractual behaviour in the procurement system, which we investigated in a sample of Slovak contracting authorities at the level of local government as well as central government. This is an analysis of changes in contracts that were concluded on the basis of the law on public procurement. While the pre-contractual phase is treated by law, in the post-contractual phase we can identify something like "a legal vacuum", which can be exploited to corrupt practices. Article examines how important (particularly in terms of impact on the price) are changes in the contracts concluded under the law on public contracts and whether it is possible to identify some factors which affect this behaviour. The regression analysis showed that the prices ex-post rise more if the open procedure was used as well as if there was strong competition on the supply side (In these cases, it is more difficult to ex-ante manipulate with the outcome of the public contract). Therefore, it is probably that a number of amendments closed an evasion of the law on public procurement, and leads to losses in the public finances.

Keywords: corruption, Slovak Republic, Public Procurement, post-contractual behaviour