What contact is permitted?
The contact the pack permits, through the officer the pack names, in the window the pack sets. Questions go in writing. Answers come back to all tenderers. Site visits and briefings run on the invitation’s rules, and anything material said there should return as a written addendum or it did not happen.
Everything else is closed. The officer you already know, the end user who likes your work, the former colleague now inside the agency: none of them is a channel once the notice is open. A firm that treats relationship warmth as a parallel process is manufacturing a probity event with its own hands.
What do you disclose, and when?
Interests, relationships, and anything a reasonable observer could read as an advantage, before you price, in writing, with the mitigation attached. A former employee on the evaluation panel. A subcontractor advising the buyer on the same programme. A board member with a related interest. A gift or hospitality history the process asks about.
Disclosure is not confession. It is a control: name it, fence it, offer the mitigation, and let the buyer decide. Undisclosed conflicts discovered late do not get fenced. They get excluded. The Office of the Auditor-General’s procurement guidance is the integrity backdrop agencies work against; treat its existence as the reason the paper trail matters, not as a paragraph you can cite to waive a pack rule.
What does Rule 28 cover?
Rule 28 sets out the reasons an agency may exclude a supplier from a contract opportunity. May, not must; read the actual grounds in the current Rules rather than assuming any single blemish is automatically fatal, or that a clean record is automatically safe. Exclusion grounds, participation conditions, and award criteria are different tests answered in different parts of the process.
Do not turn a missing certificate at submission into a universal no-bid rule of your own invention either. What matters is what the pack requires, when it requires it, and what evidence the buyer will accept. Time the evidence to the pack, not to your anxiety.
The decision trail
- Channel. Every buyer contact logged: who, when, through which officer, what was asked, what came back in writing.
- Disclosure. Each interest named with its mitigation, dated before pricing.
- Pack rules. The contact, briefing, and addendum clauses extracted, not remembered.
- Exclusion check. Rule 28 grounds read against your facts, with the uncertain ones flagged for counsel, not for the room’s optimism.
What does this mean for the bid/no-bid call?
If your only path to a win is a conversation the process forbids, the call is already no-bid. If a conflict cannot be fenced to the buyer’s satisfaction, the call is no-bid, made early, in writing, before the hours. Probity failures do not just lose the tender in front of you. They follow the firm into the next one. The Australian equivalent, for cross-border readers, is probity in public tenders. After a loss handled cleanly, the next step is the debrief.