Today, 6 February 2017, the Center for Civil Communications (CCC) published the Report from the regular monitoring of public procurement procedures conducted during the period from January to June 2016.
Key findings
The mechanism established in terms of market research and obtaining approval from the council of public procurements does not yield expected effects, having in mind continued practices on setting eligibility criteria for economic operators that are irrelevant and disproportional to relevant procurement subjects, which ultimately results in limited competition.
Decision-making at the council of public procurements is both inefficient and inconsistent. most often, the council issues approval only after submission of second corrected application, and sometimes even after submission of third application. this situation results in exceptionally high number of applications for approval. In the first six months of 2016, the council was presented with total of 8,360 applications for approval, while contracting authorities were invoiced costs for them in total amount of 877,595 eur.
Average number of bids calculated for this monitoring sample is 2.92. However, this average is due to exceptionally high number of bids submitted in only 37% of monitored procedures that were marked by up to 14 bids per tender procedure. on the other hand, 39% of tender procedures were presented with only one bid and 19% of monitored procurements were presented with 2 bids each. Additional concerns are raised by the fact that monitoring activities established an unprecedented high number of companies whose bids have been assessed as unacceptable in the bid-evaluation stage and were excluded from selection of the most favourable bid.
E-auctions were not organized in half of monitored procurements (49.6%). In many cases in which e-auctions did take place, effects thereof in terms of budget savings are insignificant. It seems that the module on submission of final price barely produces any effect.
The trend on reduced use of non-transparent negotiation procedures without prior announcement of call for bids continued. In the first half of 2016, the amount of funds spent under this type of procurement contracts accounted for 6.6 million eur, which is by 42.6% less compared to the same period last year.
In the first half of 2016, 22% of announced tender procedures were annulled, which is indicative of increased number of tender annulments by 3.5 percentile points compared to the same period last year. in this monitoring period, as was the case before, the most dominant reason indicated for tender annulment implied the fact that no bids have been submitted.
In the first half of this year, companies presented the state commission on public procurement appeals with 312 appeals, which is by 24% higher than the same period last year. the share of appealed tender procedure remains at the low level of 3.4%.
Comparison of eu regulations and relevant legislation of countries in the region, both eu member-states and candidate countries, shows alignment of legal provisions governing criteria on contract award with the old and, in the case of eu member-states, with the new eu directive. All countries included in the comparative analysis use “economically most favourable bid” as the single criterion (with “lowest price” defined as sub-criterion) or both criteria in parallel. macedonia remains among the few, if not the only country in europe that uses “lowest price” as the only criterion for selection of the most favourable bid.
You can read the research in Macedonian and English language
For more information, please contact the Center for Civil Communications at (02) 3213-513 or at center@ccc.org.mk.
The present report is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) within the USAID Civil Society Project.