Evidence and Audit as Competitive Requirements

A — Question and Function of the Dossier
EU defence-industrial instruments increasingly operate through eligibility gates that must be demonstrated, not merely asserted. The resulting competitive divider is therefore not only substantive compliance with sovereignty and supply-chain constraints, but the ability to evidence compliance in a form that can survive contractual incorporation, verification, and post-award scrutiny. This dossier establishes why “evidence readiness” is a structural attribute of institutional market access. EDIP conditions Union funding on firm-level perimeter requirements such as establishment and executive management location, and on action-level conditions such as localisation of assets used for supported actions. EDIP, Article 9(1), Article 9(3). SAFE shifts comparable perimeter logic into procurement by requiring that participation requirements be embedded in procurement procedures and resulting contracts for common procurements supported under the instrument, which makes evidence a contractual obligation rather than an internal compliance claim. SAFE, Article 16(2)–(3). STEP adds a project-level label, the Sovereignty Seal, which is awarded under defined conditions and must be evidenced as an institutional award where it is claimed. STEP, Article 4(1)–(3). The key point is that these instruments do not create value through narrative alignment but through enforceable tests; the business-relevant consequence is that the decisive question becomes whether a firm can assemble and maintain an evidence package that maps to each test at the level where the test applies. This includes corporate perimeter proof, control and safeguard proof where relevant, bill-of-materials proof, design-authority and IP proof, and contract-level flow-down proof. Where the legal texts do not specify standard evidence templates, that absence must be treated as such; operational packaging becomes a matter of programme practice outside the scope of the provided corpus, and cannot be asserted as a legal requirement. STEP, Article 4(4)–(6).