The public procurement procedures in October 2020 – March 2021 were planned defectively. This resulted in reduced efficiency procurement and wasting of public funds. The normative documents concerning public procurement for managing the COVID-19 pandemic generated reduced transparency and a rise in the amount of public money used outside the transparent procurement system. The conclusions were presented in a roundtable meeting entitled “Legal abuses in Public Procurement during the Pandemic”, which was staged by the Association for Efficient and Responsible Governance (AGER), IPN reports.
According to AGER, there are no mechanisms for executing the decisions of the National Dispute Resolution Agency. Some of the contracting authorities initiate repeated public procurement procedures with the same object after filing challenges to the Agency. The competition within the public procurement procedures is limited by applying improper procedures or by adjusting the technical specifications. There is no efficient control and the procurement-related violations are not penalized. The public procurement contracts are assigned to economic operators that submit noncompliant documents. Civic society continues to have insufficient instruments for influencing and stopping the illegal procedures.
According to AGER data, 259 of the 381 assessed public health facilities in October 2020 – March 2021 didn’t provide data about public procurement, 112 presented data, while 10 didn’t perform public procurement procedures.
Nadejda Tanasov, head of the monitoring division of the Public Procurement Agency, said the most frequent deviations were related to incomplete documents or documents that were completed incorrectly. Some of the contracts were assigned to unqualified economic operators or operators that do not meet the requirements (85 public procurement procedures), while the absence of the minimum number of required bidders was determined in 51 public procurement procedures.
The bids with lower prices were often excluded unjustifiably. Some of the public procurement procedures were groundlessly cancelled, while some of the contract assignment announcements weren’t published. Among the violations identified in the execution of contracts were the unfounded increase in the value of procurement contracts, unjustified extension of the execution period, non-imposition of penalties when the procurement contracts were executed inappropriately or weren’t executed, stated Nadejda Tanasov.
