ICV certification
ICV grace period: what it does and does not protect
ICV certificates expire. A grace period is the interval Tawteen allows between an expired certificate and a renewed one, during which a supplier may keep bidding rather than being shut out the day the old certificate lapses. It is a bridge, not an exemption — and the bridge has conditions attached, not a blanket extension.
To bid while in grace, a supplier must submit a letter from their ICV certifier confirming that recertification has already been initiated. A lapsed certificate with no certifier letter behind it is treated the same as no certificate at all. For micro and small suppliers specifically, Tawteen offers a simplified certification track, and that simplified certificate can be extended annually up to three times — a recognition that a smaller company's certification cycle is a real cost, not only a compliance formality.
None of this changes what the score itself does once a bid is evaluated. Grace protects a supplier's right to submit a bid; it says nothing about what score gets used once that bid is compared against a rival's.
Why a lapsing certificate is a commercial problem, not an administrative one
It is easy to read "grace period" as a purely procedural matter — a paperwork window to be closed by getting the renewal filed. The more consequential effect sits in the evaluation itself. Qatar's tender evaluation compares bids on Financial Outcome = Bid Price × (1 − ICV%), with the lowest outcome winning, so the score attached to a bid is folded directly into the number that decides who wins — not scored separately from price. The full mechanism is set out in what your ICV score is actually worth in a Qatar tender .
A supplier whose certificate has lapsed, or whose recertified score comes back lower than the one it replaces, is not merely behind on paperwork — it is bidding from a worse position on every tender it enters until the certificate is current again. Against the spread of scores currently on file, a supplier at the 10th percentile (13.6) is conceding a 17.2% price cushion to one at the median (26.3) — a gap of exactly the kind a lapsed or outdated certificate can open up, silently, on every bid submitted while it stands.
This is also why the recertification wave matters beyond any one company's paperwork. Qatar's cost-over-cost formula change has been pushing scores up across the market — the scale of that shift is documented in the ICV bar moved . A supplier sitting in grace, or renewing on the old formula's terms, is not standing still while the market moves; it is falling behind a market that is actively rising.
The practical takeaway is to treat a certifier's letter and a grace-period bid as a temporary position, not a resolved one, and to track the recertified score once it lands the same way a competitor's score would be tracked — because until it lands, every bid submitted under grace carries the same price exposure as an expired certificate would.
Method: current-score spread across 907 companies on file, each counted once at its most recent certified year, coverage 2020–2026. We do not hold reliable counts of companies currently in grace or with expired certificates in this build, and none are stated here. The ICV weighting actually applied in any given tender is set by that tender's own documents and is not always the full ICV percentage.
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