Government procurement has always been a sensitive area where public money meets public service. That makes the recent amendment to the Public Procurement Act of 2006, brought through an ordinance recently, particularly significant as it seeks to change the way the state buys goods, works and services. On paper the changes look generous. Contractors shut out for years get a way back in, while women and very small firms get easier conditions. Tender evaluation will also look beyond the lowest price to consider quality, durability, energy efficiency and environmental impact. At the same time, bids that appear impossibly low can be questioned while firms found guilty of corruption can be barred from procurement, though only after written notice and an opportunity to be heard. Anyone who follows procurement in Bangladesh will sense something familiar here. Many of these promises have been made before in one form or other. The electronic government procurement system, or eGP, was introduced for transparency and the rules were already clear about who should win a work order and why. Still, the same complaints persist. So the real question is not what the new law says. It is what the new law changes in practice and whether those who mastered the old system may simply have been handed a fresh set of rules to work with.
The most talked about addition to the new ordinance is the creation of a special category for disadvantaged persons who allegedly missed out on government contracts over the past two decades. The idea of giving overlooked businesses a second chance sounds fair on the surface. But without clear criteria for deciding who was genuinely overlooked, the provision could easily be misused. It is an open secret that in Bangladesh, a change of government is followed by the rise of a new class of politically connected entrepreneurs eager to claim a share of public contracts. Many of them have neither the technical capacity nor the financial strength needed to carry out complex projects. What they have instead is political backing, local influence and the ability to get work orders that would be difficult to secure on merit alone. If such people are now brought under the label of disadvantaged contractors, this provision intended to widen competition could simply replace one group of favoured contractors with another. The same concern applies to the easier entry conditions for micro and small firms. Without strong checks after a contract is awarded, entities that lack the capacity to do the work can win on relaxed criteria and then pass the job to others, or worse, take an advance and fail to complete it. Thus, the reform meant to widen competition can end up becoming a sanitised entry route for political loyalists. The public pays twice, once for the contracts awarded as political favour and once for the work that was never done properly.
The problem does not end with who gets a contract. The tendering itself remains wide open to manipulation and the government offices concerned are often in cahoots with those who want the work. One common tactic is to break a large project into several small work orders, each kept just below the threshold that would demand a more competitive and closely watched method. Another is to do the work first through a preselected contractor and hold the tender later, only to create the papers needed to draw the bills. The bid documents can be drafted around the chosen man’s qualifications so that only he fits. Companies linked to him submit dummy bids, and suddenly there is the appearance of a contest where none existed. Everything looks proper on paper. Several firms submit documents, all the required forms are in place, and nothing in the file suggests the bidding was a drama staged after the result was fixed. That is the real damage. When the winner is decided before the bidding begins, competition becomes meaningless. The problem, in other words, is not simply that some contractors have found ways to win contracts. It is that the process itself can be manipulated to make the winner appear legitimate.
What makes all this more alarming is that the new ordinance leaves the door to such manipulation open and then presents the opening as reform. Buried in the amendment is what it calls an alternative procurement arrangement. Under this, goods and services can be bought directly or from a single source skipping the normal when national security, public interest or important economic considerations are said to require it. There are genuine emergencies in which a lengthy bidding process can cause serious harm. The problem is that “emergency” has long been one of the most convenient words in a government file. Hundreds of millions of taka have been justified as emergencies and later left behind as monuments to waste. Unless the circumstances that qualify as an emergency are narrowly defined and the reasons are made public each time the provision is used, this arrangement could become an easy way around the very transparency the procurement rules are supposed to protect.
To be fair, the amendment also contains some useful tools. Scoring bids against set criteria, evaluating technical and financial proposals separately, requiring checks on abnormally low bids and disclosing the ownership of the winning company are all steps in the right direction. The last of these may be the most important, because the person whose name appears on a company’s licence is not always the person who actually controls it or benefits from the contract. But none of these safeguards can achieve much if the people applying them are willing to look the other way. The law may provide the tools, but politics can still decide who qualifies as new, who is considered competent, who is deemed disadvantaged and who ultimately gets the contract. Unless political or other interference is met with consequences, procurement will remain less about buying goods and services for the public and more about distributing power through public money.
Source: https://thefinancialexpress.com.bd/columns/who-will-benefit-from-procurement-reform
