Nearly 90% of public funds spent by state and municipalities go through procurement procedures. Only since the beginning of this year the total value of concluded contracts have already neared BGN1 billion. For the difficult 2011 institutions have allocated through public tenders over BGN5.7 billion lev. It is no secret, however, that instead of a tool to combat corruption, the public procurement in Bulgaria is rather a basic legal way to siphon state money. Winners known in advance, hidden conditions, annexes of subsequent appreciation, lack of transparency, etc. – these are just some of the techniques for proper spending of millions coming from the state. It is true that because of complaints of foreign companies and the criticisms of the European Union in recent years, both the legislation and the organization of competitions have been changed and amended dozens of times, but now the national legislation still has many loopholes that can be used by personal interests.
The notion that money is most often awarded to only a certain range of companies is evident also from and the dissatisfaction of industry organizations. After the Bulgarian Industrial Association strongly opposed the innovations to the Public Procurement Act introduced by the ruling GERB party, last week also the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry requested drastic changes in the conduct of public auctions. Firstly, businesses insist that tenders should be computerized. The idea is to have clear and precise criteria for classifications and not special committees, while computer programme filter candidates. Thus, the choice of the winner can be impartial, and all the facts will be subject to public scrutiny. Such a proposal would really change things radically, but the government is unlikely to accept it. Not surprisingly, only a month ago the government introduced the option of contracting authorities having the right to control the work of selection committees on their own initiative or at the signal of an interested person. In other words, mayors, ministers and heads of government agencies can now intervene and correct the decisions of assessors in the right direction. The argument for this privilege was that ultimately an evaluation committee is a subsidiary body of the sponsor, that is appointed by the latter to perform a specific job, following the norms of law, and final responsibility is always for the contracting authority. In the view of businesses, however, this option renders the functions of the commission dependent and provide opportunities for direct and immediate control over them.
However the easiest way to overcome this problem is to include representatives of the industry or international NGOs in the committee. The branch organizations are organizations of the possible contracting parties, but also a union of competitors, where it is slightly more difficult than in public organizations to hide things from society, said the President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Tzvetan Simeonov last week. Now it is almost impossible to understand how the discussion and evaluation of bids is carried out, as evaluators are permanent employees of the institutions and have no interest to export any information. By law, the composition of a committee should also count on an external expert with suitable education, but usually this figure also prefers to remain silent. Not to mention the fact that all external experts have so far been virtually unknown to industry professionals. There was also a case brought to the Supreme Administrative Court when the external expert was proven not to be qualified for the job.
