Evolution of Market price control mechanisms (COMPETE 2020)

When preparing for the Programming Period 2014-2020 there was an effort in trying to assess the real costs of travel and training by analyzing hundreds of projects from the past programming period. The main problem was that most costs were capped, and as such, all results were false positives, because when SME’s submitted expenses which generally exceeded those caps, their eligibility was limited to those maximum costs.
In the present programming period, travel and training costs have maximum value per trip or per hour of training, and some of our calls, mainly those related to Vouchers, (including the I. 4.0 Voucher) had a maximum budget established (20.000€) which encompassed all the tasks needed to implement the project. These projects, had another singularity, as all of the suppliers were preselected from a database. Nonetheless, this was an outlier event, as normally there isn’t any preselection. R&D projects, for instance, have a dissimilar approach because the projects and their budgets are analyzed by experts using market references. Other control mechanisms being used are Public contracts, when applicable, using the best or lowest cost, considering a number of prerequisites as a criteria for selection. Finally, the last evolution is the use of simplified cost options as a control method, as these were defined using National and European statistical databases on market costs, defining a cost per unit (training hour, cost per trip considering distance intervals, etc.)