Procurement law exists to secure value for money. That is its promise, its justification, the reason every tender takes weeks or months: price transparency, comparable bids, the cheapest offer wins. On complex federal IT projects, the opposite happens routinely. Germany's Federal Court of Audit examined thirteen major federal IT projects in its 2022 annual report and found an average cost overrun of 47 percent against the original award price. That is not a handful of isolated cases. It is a systemic pattern, and one structural cause lies in the thrift principle itself.
The mechanism is simple once you see it. Procurement law relies on clear specifications and price comparison at the moment of the tender. For standardized goods such as office supplies, vehicles, or construction to a known standard, that works well. For developing complex IT systems that grow and change over three years or more, it is a flawed design. Nobody can fully define at tender stage what they will need three years later. So the process forces either specifications too rigid to survive contact with reality, or expensive renegotiations with contractors who by then face no real competition.
The list of projects caught in this pattern is long and familiar: Elster, the online tax-filing system, the IVBB government network, the federal digital ID, the unified public-service phone line D115, several court information systems. Projects completed late, over budget, or short on functionality between 2010 and 2023. The reports on them read, year after year, like variations on the same theme.
"Nobody can fully define at tender stage what they will need three years later."
Here is the paradox: procurement law already holds the tools that would break this pattern. Innovation partnerships and negotiated procedures let agencies talk through a solution with bidders instead of fixing it in advance. Output-based specification demands results instead of rigid technical descriptions. Both instruments are legally available. Both are barely used in practice, because procurement culture confuses thrift with a fixed price at tender time, instead of with actual total cost. That confusion is exactly what turns thrift into the most expensive option, again and again.