The bill to amend the Law on Public Procurement proposed by the Ministry of Finance needs to be improved. Otherwise, the law will be inefficient and the goal to harmonize the national legislation with the European one will not be achieved. The Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Corruption (CAPC) analyzed the bill and formulated proposals for improving it.
In a news conference at IPN, expert Viorel Parvan said that the bill does not have economic-financial substantiation even if it envisions additional spending from the budget, especially for creating an agency for dealing with challenges. “This institution is a novelty for Moldova. The European states have such institutions whose activity implies costs. The bill author should have provided an economic motivation,” he stated.
The text of the bill is hard and difficulties can be encountered in the implementation process. The bill contains amendments to the Law on Public Procurement. Viorel Parvan said that the amendments cover one third of the provisions and thus a new law should be adopted, while the old one should be abrogated.
Besides the fact that the text is difficult, the author also uses such corruptible expressions as ‘maybe’ or ‘in case’. These expressions allow the contractor to take certain actions and the bill thus becomes corruptible.
The bill provides that in the case of services or works that imply high costs, the announcements about the acquisitions are published in the Official Journal of the European Union. But the procedure and the terms are not stipulated and thus this provision is not implementable. The expert believes that the new law should stipulate that the Financial Inspectorate must check how the contracts are carried out so as to eliminate cases when the works are not of a high quality or the money is laundered.
CAPC head Galina Bostan underlined that if the bill is adopted in the given form, it’s hard to say what its efficiency will be.
The bill was appraised within the Vulnerability Expertise of the Draft Normative and Legal Acts Project that is supported financially by Matra Rule of Law and Good Governance Program of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
