Amendments to Public Procurement Contracts in Times of Crises

The present study aims to analyze and explain the multilayered challenges that may occur during the performance of a public procurement contract, with specific reference to the possibilities foreseen by the legislation to modify the contract without the need to retender. It intends to contribute to the assessment of the transposition of the rules regarding public contract amendment from 2014/24 Directive in the Romanian legislation. From the wording of the Romanian legal framework, it is clear that the intention of the national legislator was to ensure much less flexibility than the one provided by the Directive. It used again the gold plating system and made these rules mandatory also for contracts bellow the EU thresholds. With the intention of clarifying the aspects transposed from the European Directive, the legislator has not only developed a primary and secondary legislation but also continued by using tertiary regulation. The public procurement process occurs in the context of complex interactions between policy imperatives, financing, supply market operations, complex economic environment, and stakeholder influences, and the intensive regulatory adjustments or new provisions (mainly by tertiary legislation) are not effective in addressing all apparent dysfunctions in the system.