Hungary's procurement watchdog exists because the state buys too much — not to fix that.

Rationale

A public-procurement supervisory authority is, on the framework's own instruction, to be examined as evidence of an underlying problem rather than as a solution to it. The authority exists because the Hungarian state buys on a very large scale, and large-scale discretionary state purchasing generates contestable rents — the supplier who wins a state contract earns a return that depends on the award decision rather than purely on competitive performance. The procurement authority is the state's attempt to police the rent allocation its own purchasing volume creates. It is, in the framework's terms, part of the construction, not the cure: no procurement supervisor can substitute for the discipline that a smaller state purchasing footprint would supply automatically, because the supervisor is reviewing the formal regularity of awards, not the prior question of whether the state should have been buying at that scale at all. The honest classification ties the authority's phase-out to the reduction of the underlying activity: as the reform programme set out across the other chapters reduces the volume of discretionary state purchasing — fewer state-funded programmes, fewer transfers routed through procurement, a smaller state commercial footprint — the supervisory load falls correspondingly, and the authority can be wound down to a small residual function or folded into a general administrative-law oversight body. This is not a claim that procurement irregularity does not matter; it is the claim that the irregularity is a symptom, and that treating the symptom permanently while the cause grows is the more expensive path. The 8-year horizon is set to track the pace at which the underlying state-purchasing volume can realistically be reduced across the budget as a whole; it is not a discretionary delay.