The draft amendment to the Law on Public Procurement as prepared by Deputy Premier Daniela Bobeva, and under whose current version over the past five years the state handed over 33 billion levs to businesses is now ready. Just days after the first public presentation of the final version of the document, it has already been submitted for discussion in parliament and is scheduled to enter into force on 1 October.
Along with the previously announced changes, covered in detail in issue No 30 of the BANKER weekly, the full text of the bill reveals a number of developments which will inevitably increase the transparency in the spending of public funds. This is the proposed new provision of Art. 8b paragraph 2, which requires contracting entities to maintain public information on their websites or on a separate website. In the current regulatory framework this profile is of desirable nature, not obligatory. The proof is that only a handful of departments put online the documents from the tenders, and most do not even report they carry out such procedures.
In the future contracting authorities will be required to publish all documents relating to or reflecting the conduct of procurement and execution of contracts. The minimum requirements for public information are summarized in 20 points, which, if approved by Parliament, will eliminate all mysteries and ambiguities in the use of public funds.
Besides the already available access to the internal rules, preliminary notices, documents for participation in the procedures, decisions to open public calls, the profile will present the views of the Public Procurement Agency for carrying out preliminary control that often reveal attempts at misuse and corruption.
Decisions for ranking and determining the winner in competitions (which are now kept aside of the public attention) will be published. Critical measure is the mandatory uploading of the minutes of the sessions of competition committees. Right now they are almost secret documents, although it is these documents that describe the reasons for selecting a specific offer or the elimination of another. And the protocols can show all those gaps in the offers of the candidates that the committee members turn a blind eye to.
The proposed changes will make public information also the dates of the release of deposits for participation in auctions that state and municipal agencies in recent years kept locked for a long period without any compensation to the businesses.
Unveiling of the fog will be continued through the additional disclosure of the agreements for amendments to the public procurement contracts – called annexes, which adjust prices, deadlines and other important details. With the help of these, previously, inaccessible to the public view additional agreements many contracts soared significantly in price, and even manage to double their prices in recent years. It is enough to recall the construction of the Danube Bridge 2, Tsankov Kamak and highways Trakia and Lyulin, where the initial values at which the private companies had won the projects subsequently increased by about 50 percent.
The public profile will also list subcontracting agreements and amendments thereto, which actually is an absolute novelty, as even the very names of subcontractors have so far been a secret. But there is something more – the public information will now consist also of the announcement of the date, the reason and the amount of each payment under public contracts and subcontracts, including advanced payments.
Last but not least documents evidencing acceptance of the work done and which are used for interim and final payments are planned to be available online. This way the public will be able to monitor how the implementation of a project goes, and whether state and local governments are delaying payments for activities already carried out.
As a rule, all documents must be uploaded on the profile in the first working day after their dispatch to the Public Procurement Agency. Contracts, additional agreements and documents relating to their implementation will be published within 30 days after the occurrence of the event. Accordingly, the information on the websites of entities will be stored for at least one year.
Along with all the above, the draft bill introduces mandatory indication of the estimated value of the procurement order, which up to now has often been left out of the disclosed information.
What is also envisaged is the requirement to write specific motives to the criteria for selecting candidates to curb the possibility for a minister, mayor or director of an agency to subjectively predetermine the outcome of a contest through the imposition of onerous conditions to smaller participants. The impact of contracting authority will be limited through the provision establishing a requirement that over a half of the members of the evaluation committees should not be their employees, but selected electronically – by lot at the Public Procurement Agency. The agency itself will carry out prior control on all public procurement procedures, and not only on those financed from EU funds. Moreover, its recommendations will be replaced by specific instructions which entities will be forced to comply with.
The BANKER
