Contents
- The authority wins ninety-eight percent of the time
- Who brings PPAB proceedings?
- Which cases does the authority pick?
- Fewer ex officio proceedings since 2022
- Prior work on the win rate
- What happens at the courts?
- Three doubts about the win rate
- Lessons for contracting authorities and complainants
- Methodological note
The authority wins ninety-eight percent of the time
Between 2022 and mid-2026, in Hungary, the Chair of the Public Procurement Authority (hereafter PPA Chair) reached a merit decision in four hundred and fifty-four cases before the Public Procurement Arbitration Board (hereafter PPAB). Seven of those were lost. The rest ended in a finding of infringement. Over the same period, the complainant side, that is, market participants, construction contractors, healthcare suppliers and public institutions, won 416 of 666 merit cases. A sixty-two and a half percent win rate.
The gap between the two numbers is thirty-six percentage points. The most striking pattern in the public procurement remedies system is who brings the case, not the particular infringement sitting behind it.
A case-by-case reanalysis of the 2,511 PPAB proceedings shows how the pattern of decisions splits by type of initiator. The type of initiator is the best predictor of the outcome of a PPAB merit decision.
Who brings PPAB proceedings?
The Hungarian Public Procurement Act (Act CXLIII of 2015, hereafter "Kbt.") and the Public Procurement Authority's summary report distinguish four initiator categories. Three are ex officio, one is on complaint. The new analysis gives a separate figure for each of the four.
| Initiator | Cases | Merit decisions | Won | Win rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| On complaint | 1,469 | 666 | 416 | 62.5% |
| PPA Chair, contract review | 193 | 189 | 187 | 98.9% |
| PPA Chair, other grounds | 275 | 265 | 260 | 98.1% |
| Other ex officio | 481 | 332 | 270 | 81.3% |
| Total (with known initiator) | 2,418 | 1,452 | 1,133 | 78.0% |
The two PPA Chair categories together produced 454 merit decisions out of 468 cases, and 447 of those ended in a finding of infringement. That is a 98.46 percent win rate, or seven losses out of four hundred and fifty-four merit decisions.
The difference between the 2,418 known-initiator cases and the 2,511 full-corpus total is accounted for by the 93 publicly available decisions in which the initiator could not be identified unambiguously. Those cases fall outside the win-rate calculations.
The ex officio share for the 2022-2026 period is 39 percent. That sits close to the 36.8 percent figure for the first half of 2026 in the Public Procurement Authority's own summary report.
The two halves of the complainant side
The complainant category is not homogeneous. Of 102 cases with a public-institution complainant, 65 reached a merit decision and 64 of those ended in the institution's favour. A 98.5 percent win rate. Of the 1,244 cases with a market-participant complainant, 553 reached a merit decision, with 326 won. A 59 percent win rate. The split deserves an article of its own.
Which cases does the authority pick?
The PPA Chair's high win rate rests in part on case selection. The cases the authority brings are not evenly distributed across the possible types of infringement.
The authority's terrain
In ex officio cases the subject-matter centre of gravity is ex post review of contract performance. The characteristic infringement types are failure to publish a contract-amendment notification, breach of the obligation to publish notice amendments, and contracts concluded in disregard of the Kbt. All three share one feature: the fact can be checked after the event from documents. The PPAB does not have to rule on a complex evaluative question.
The complainant's terrain
Complainants play on different terrain. Grounds for invalidity under Kbt. Section 73 and the proof of suitability requirements under Kbt. Section 69 are the most frequent legal bases cited. Both are areas where the PPAB has to weigh whether the contracting authority's assessment was lawful. The outcome is less certain. That partly explains why the complainant win rate hovers around sixty percent.
The selection explanation is not the only one available. A later section of the article sets out what the data cannot rule out.
Fewer ex officio proceedings since 2022
The ex officio share is not constant. In 2022, ex officio initiations accounted for 50.9 percent of PPAB cases. In 2023 that fell to 38.8 percent, and to 35.3 percent in 2024. In 2025 it rose back to 39.6 percent. Over the first eight months of 2026 it dropped to 31.0 percent. A twenty-percentage-point drop over four years, not monotonically.
The trend admits two readings. One: the preventive effect is working. If regulatory oversight is a sufficient deterrent, contracting authorities draft their contract amendments more carefully, publish notices more precisely, and conclude fewer contracts in disregard of the Kbt. The cases the PPA Chair would have brought earlier are not initiated at all. The other reading: the authority has simply dialled back its activity. Neither reading can be confirmed on the current data. The 2026 figure is a partial year and no final conclusion can be drawn from it.
Among ex officio initiators, after the PPA Chair, the Managing Authorities of the Prime Minister's Office, the National Development Centre, the State Audit Office and the Integrity Authority bring the most cases. The ex officio side is distributed across seventy-one different initiating bodies, substantive but not monopolistic.
Prior work on the win rate
The doctoral dataset for 2015-2022
The earlier research literature on public procurement remedies in Hungary is dr. Soós Gábor Gergely's 2024 doctoral dissertation, defended at the University of Public Service. Soós examined PPAB decisions on cases financed from European Union sources between 2015 and 2022. In his sample, the PPA Chair won well-founded or partially well-founded decisions in 94 of 103 initiations. A 91.3 percent win rate.
The new 2022-2026 data
In the new analysis, over the full 2022-2026 PPAB corpus, the two PPA Chair categories together show a 98.46 percent win rate. The difference between the two samples is seven percentage points.
The difference between the two samples
The methodological fine print matters. The boundaries of Soós's window were different. He examined a longer period, his definition of a merit case differs slightly, and his sample only included cases financed from European Union sources. The difference between 91.3 and 98.46 is therefore indicative, not direct evidence of a one-way improvement in the authority's practice. It may be partly a sampling effect.
What happens at the courts?
Judicial review of PPAB decisions runs through the Budapest-Capital Regional Court. Across the whole 2022-2026 period, review applications are filed in 17 percent of cases. Looking at it by initiator, review frequency is similar: 15.7 percent in complainant cases, 16.2 percent in PPA Chair cases, 18.5 percent in other ex officio cases. The authority's dominance therefore does not stem from a lack of judicial filtering.
The BKK ticket-machine case
The BKK ticket-machine case shows that judicial review can be substantive. In the original case, decision D.328/2021, the PPAB fined both the BKK Budapest Transport Centre (BKK) and T-Systems Magyarország Zrt. for amending the 5-year ticket-machine operation contract on 2 June 2020 without running a public procurement procedure. The legal basis for the finding of infringement was Kbt. Section 141 paragraph (8), with reference to Section 141 paragraph (4)(c). The contract carries a procurement value of HUF 4.82 billion.
By its judgment of 23 March 2022, the Budapest-Capital Regional Court annulled the provisions of the fines imposed on BKK and remitted the matter to the PPAB for fresh proceedings. The court found the reasoning of the decision too narrow and insufficiently differentiated, not the finding of infringement itself. In the fresh proceedings, decision D.283/2022, the PPAB reimposed the 2 × HUF 35 million fine on BKK, now with detailed reasoning, under Kbt. Section 165 paragraph (6)(a) and (e) and Section 165 paragraph (7a). The T-Systems fines were not taken to judicial review.
Judicial review is therefore not a counterweight to the authority's win rate. It checks the lawfulness of the finding and the substance of the reasoning.
Three doubts about the win rate
Three alternative explanations for the 98.46 percent win rate remain, and the data cannot definitively rule them out.
Are contracting authorities passive?
It is conceivable that in ex officio cases contracting authorities systematically mount a less substantive defence than they do against market participants. For a ministry-run institution or a state-owned company, the reputational cost of a hard-fought legal battle before the PPAB may run higher than paying the fine. If that is true, the ninety-eight percent is in part the product not of legal strength but of the audited contracting authority's passivity.
Is there institutional deference toward the authority?
It is conceivable that the PPAB operates with a systematic institutional deference toward certain institutional initiators. The PPA Chair may carry particular weight in the PPAB's law-application practice. Statistically, this could only be separated from the selection explanation if the two sides brought comparable cases.
Is the defence dropped at the court stage?
It is conceivable that some contracting authorities deliberately do not turn to the court in ex officio cases. The review rates do not directly bear this out, because the ex officio and complainant sides go to the Budapest-Capital Regional Court at roughly similar rates. What the data cannot show is how substantively the contracting authorities concerned actually defend themselves at the court stage.
None of the three alternatives rules out the selection explanation. Taken together, they indicate that the ninety-eight percent win rate is not the result of a single cause, and all three deserve to be kept in view in any legal-policy reading of the number.
Lessons for contracting authorities and complainants
The PPA Chair's high win rate does not come down to a single factor. Selection accounts for part of the pattern. The quality of the audited contracting authority's defence, institutional authority, and passivity at the court stage are further factors that cannot be separated out from the data.
The complainant sixty-two percent win rate is not low. The complainant side cites different infringements, touches on more evaluative questions, and so faces a less certain outcome. Processing times also reflect the difference in case type. The median time to a merit decision is 52 days in complainant cases, 81 days in PPA Chair contract-review cases, 83 days in other ex officio cases, and 73 days in the PPA Chair other category. In ex officio cases the PPAB takes roughly one and a half times as long to reach a merit decision.
What should the contracting authority take away?
On the present data, an ex officio procedure is hard to walk away from without a finding of infringement. Keeping contract-amendment notifications in order, publishing notice corrections precisely, and running the procurement procedure by the book are all low-cost preventive measures. In an ex post review, only documentability protects you, not argument.
What should the complainant take away?
From the complainant side, the 62.5 percent win rate means that substantive argument is worthwhile but not a foregone conclusion. The quality of the submission and the choice of legal basis matter. Arguments under Kbt. Sections 69 and 73 are particularly sensitive to how well the contracting authority's assessment can be documented.
The two channels of the remedies system are not alternatives to one another. They are complementary. Market participants focus on the pre-procedure and enforcement stage, the authority on ex post contract review. The two areas essentially do not overlap.
Methodological note
The analysis covers 2,511 Hungarian PPAB proceedings between 2022 and mid-2026. Further cases joined to a main case appear under the main case. The numbers published in the Public Procurement Authority's summary report differ somewhat from the figures in this analysis, since each initiation submitted appears there as a separate case while here they are consolidated under the post-joinder main case.