The tender period for the contracting of the psychological care service for whistleblowers of corruption of the Valencian Anti-Fraud Agency is now open
València, March 5, 2024.- The Valencian Anti-Fraud Agency has published on the Public Sector Procurement Platform the tender notice for the contracting of the psychological assistance and care service for people who whistleblow corruption.
The Law on the creation of the Agency and the regulation governing the Statute of the Whistleblower of Corruption include the right to psychological support for the person reporting corruption, which also appears in Law 2/2023 regulating the protection of persons who report regulatory and anti-corruption breaches. Specifically, article 37 of this law specifies psychological help among the measures to support these people. This law was enacted in transposition of European Directive 2019/1937, which in its article 20.2 provides that Member States may provide support measures to whistleblowers, including psychological support.
The Valencian Anti-Fraud Agency was the first entity in Spain to offer protection to whistleblowers and at the moment 37 people (one of them legal entities) have been granted the Protection Statute. In the 7 years of experience that the Agency’s staff has accumulated in the care of protection complainants, they have seen how many of these people have been forced to receive psychological treatment in the difficult situations experienced as a result of filing a complaint.
The pressure to which whistleblowers of corruption are subjected is manifested both in the professional sphere, with situations of harassment or mobbing, and in the personal and family sphere.
In order to offer the best psychological care to these people, the Agency puts out to tender the contracting of this service after carrying out a preliminary market consultation, since there is no background that serves as a reference in relation to psychological care for protection whistleblowers.
Contractual services
The contract includes three types of services that will be part of this new service. On the one hand, the psychological support service itself for whistleblowers of corruption, which will consist of a personal and direct support treatment for the person, telematically or in person of up to a maximum of 15 sessions of between 45 and 50 minutes each. In any case, this treatment would cease if the complainant was receiving psychological treatment from the public health system.
The second of the benefits refers to the assistance and accompaniment in the advice and interviews that the Agency’s staff maintains with the complainants in meetings that will last a maximum of 1 hour and a half.
And the third and last of the benefits refers to advising the Agency’s staff in charge of the protection of whistleblowers of corruption to offer them guidelines and tools that help them improve the care of these people with a maximum of 2 sessions per month.
The contract has a duration of 1 year and estimates that 30% of the protected persons, i.e. 10 people, will benefit from this service. The total cost of the contract is 14,883 euros and the deadline for submitting bids ends on March 15, 2024 at 11:59 p.m
You can find all the information on the Public Sector Procurement Platform at the following link: