Checking a bank guarantee under 44-FZ. Unified Federal Register of Bank Guarantees

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

A bank guarantee is one of two options by which suppliers working in the public order system can secure the performance of a contract. The document guarantees that if the contractor evades obligations, the bank will compensate the customer for the losses associated with this. In practice, it sometimes happens that the supplier enlists an inauthentic or low-quality bank guarantee. However, if you know all the criteria that a proper bank performance guarantee must meet, this can be avoided.

Why Guaranteed

The bank guarantee is a very convenient tool, primarily for the suppliers themselves involved in procurement under the 44-FZ law. After all, an alternative to it is only a direct transfer of money to the customer's current account. This means that the funds are withdrawn from the turnover of the organization for the entire period of the contract, which inevitably entails lost profits. You will also have to pay for a bank guarantee, but this amount is not so large. Therefore, the majority of executors in the state order system prefer to ensure their obligations not with their ownfunds, but a bank guarantee.

At its core, a bank guarantee under 44-FZ protects the interests of the customer. At the same time, it is a tool that also serves as protection for the supplier. Moreover, from the customer himself, more precisely, from his desire to expose the contractor to fines and pen alties for minor violations. After all, getting money under a bank guarantee is much more difficult than withholding a fine from collateral made with "live" money.

Risks of Poor Warranty

You can get a guarantee directly from the bank or through intermediary brokers. In both cases, there is a risk of getting a low-quality guarantee. For the supplier, this can mean not only lost time and money, but also a lost government contract, as well as the acquisition of the status of an unreliable counterparty.

The most obvious risk is getting a fake warranty, but that's not the only danger. Sometimes banks try to cheat and prescribe in the text favorable conditions for themselves, which are unacceptable as part of the provision of a state contract. An inexperienced supplier may not notice this, and then face the fact that the customer will not accept the guarantee.

Thus, both the customer and the supplier are interested in checking the bank guarantee. The first must make sure that the customer does not reject the guarantee, and the second is obliged to verify it by law. How to do it? There are several ways, and you need to use them in a complex way.

Correct bank

Rule 1: Only a bank can issue a guarantee. Noneother organization, including microfinance, cannot do this. Rule number 2: not any bank guarantee is accepted as security for a state contract, but only those that are indicated in a special list of the Ministry of Finance. Checking a bank guarantee before receiving it is as follows. You need to find a list of banks on the ministry's website that are approved by the department to issue guarantees for government contracts, and make sure that the selected credit institution is included in it.

If the bank of interest is found on the allowed list, this is a good sign, but not yet complete success. Now you need to turn to the Unified Information System (UIS) on the public procurement website. Here it is worth checking how often the required bank issued guarantees that were not accepted by customers. This can be done in the Unified Register, which reflects all guarantees issued by banks. We will return to it later when we talk about how to check a bank guarantee after issuance.

So, in the mentioned registry, you can use the filter "Refused to accept" and analyze the results for 2-3 months. It is hardly worth contacting a bank whose guarantees are constantly rejected by customers.

Document content

Before signing a guarantee agreement with a bank, you should familiarize yourself with its contents. The text must necessarily include certain provisions, without which the customer will not be able to accept it. A complete list of such conditions is contained in parts 2 and 3 of Law 44-FZ. Among them are:the amount and duration of the bank guarantee, the condition of its irrevocable, the obligation to pay a pen alty for late payment, and others. The guarantee must be issued on the letterhead of the credit institution.

Special attention should be paid to the following points. The guarantee must indicate that the bank is obliged to reimburse the losses in full, and not only in the part not covered by the pen alty. Damages must be compensated for any failure by the supplier to fulfill its obligations under the contract. At the same time, the bank should not require the customer to provide court documents as evidence that the contractor has neglected his obligations. This is important, because not every case of termination of the contract comes to court.

What else to look for

As with any transaction, when concluding an agreement with a bank, you need to focus on average market conditions. Therefore, you should first study the offers of several credit organizations in order to understand how long a bank guarantee is usually issued and how much it costs.

A bona fide guarantor will require the company to submit for consideration at least constituent documents, tax and accounting records, as well as information on the purchase. The study of this data takes several days, so the guarantee is usually issued within a week. If you are promised to issue it already “today” and / or ask for a minimum set of documents, then such an offer looks extremely suspicious. You should also be wary if a warranty is offeredpay not to the bank, but to the details of a third party.

Guarantee issued: checking the entry in the Registry

If the preliminary work is carried out carefully, then this significantly reduces the chances of receiving a "fake" or low-quality guarantee. However, it is too early to relax. After receiving the document, you need to check it in the Register of Bank Guarantees, which was mentioned above. This applies only to guarantees that are issued to ensure the performance of contracts under Law 44-FZ.

The guarantee must appear in the registry no later than the next business day after issuance. The obligation to place is assigned by law to the bank that issued the document. Verification of a bank guarantee in the register is carried out by the name of the guarantor or supplier, contract number or purchase code. As a result of the search, information about the guarantee should be displayed on the screen, and on the left side, where its amount is indicated, the status “Placed” should be displayed.

No warranty: why?

In rare cases, there are delays in the placement of a guarantee due to a malfunction of the EIS website. But one way or another, if tomorrow the guarantee is not in the registry, this is a very bad sign. Indeed, in this case, the customer will consider that the winner of the purchase has evaded the performance of his duties. The customer will not be able to sign a contract with such a supplier, otherwise he will break the law.

If the check of the bank guarantee on the public procurement website gave a negativeresult, first of all, you should contact the bank that issued it. Perhaps there was some kind of misunderstanding - in this case, it should be resolved as soon as possible. If it becomes clear that the guarantor is acting in bad faith, a complaint should be filed with the Central Bank.

Checking a bank guarantee through the Central Bank of the Russian Federation

So, with guarantees under the state order, everything is quite simple, since there is a special register. But with corporate and commercial tenders, the situation is somewhat different. Banks are under no obligation to publicly post such guarantees, so you will have to act on your own.

You can conduct a preliminary check of a bank guarantee on the website of the Central Bank. Thus, you can make sure that the bank, in principle, issues guarantees. To do this, select the "Information on credit institutions" section and find the guarantor bank in the directory.

Immediately after the search, the status of the banking license will be visible. By clicking on the name of the bank, you can see a list of its financial documents by year and month. You should open the document "Turnover data" for the latest available date. Further, in the "Off-balance sheet accounts" section, find account 91315 - it is on it that banks reflect data on guarantees. The values in this line must be different from zero, and the turnover is comparable to the amount of the guarantee.

Of course, this is only a superficial analysis - you will not get accurate information about the authenticity of your guarantee. To do this, you need to officially contact the bank that issuedguarantee, with a request to confirm its authenticity. A similar request can be submitted to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation.

Conclusions and tips

So, it is not difficult to check a bank guarantee under 44-FZ, or rather, the very fact of its issuance. However, it is equally important that it be correctly drawn up and include all the necessary conditions. A poor-quality warranty can have very unpleasant consequences for the supplier. Moreover, applying to another bank for a new document is the least of them.

Therefore, experts strongly recommend that persons who apply for bank guarantees to secure a government contract familiarize themselves with the provisions of Article 45 of the said public procurement law. It is not difficult to understand all the intricacies of this legal norm, but this will prevent you from receiving a document that is drawn up incorrectly.