Low competition in local tender procedures continues to decline despite the series of law amendments adopted in this period and aimed to turn around such tendencies, thereby increasing the number of participants in public procurement procedures. In average, public procurements from the monitoring sample were marked by participation of 2.4 bidding companies, while as high as 57% of tender procedures monitored were not presented with a single bid or were presented with only one bid.
Although they are law-mandated for all tender procedures, e-auctions were organized in only 53% of monitored procurement procedures. Low competition in tender procedures and “lowest price” defined as the single criterion for contract awarding would continue to deepen the problem related to non-organization of electronic auctions, envisaged as means for reduction of initially bided prices.
The number of annulled tender procedures in the monitoring sample maintained its high share of 20% and was marked by an increase compared to tendencies observed in the past one to two years, when it amounted to around 15%. The main reason indicated for tender annulment remains the statement that bidding companies have offered prices that are more unfavourable than those anticipated or planned by the contracting authority.
In dominant share of small procurements whose value does not exceed 5,000 EUR, companies actually had only two days to prepare their bids. In these cases, contracting authorities opted for the minimum deadline of five days for submission of bids, but announced their respective procurement notices in a manner whereby the submission deadline runs during weekends, thus effectively decreasing it by two days which, when combined with the loss of the first day when the tender procedure is announced and the last day when the deadline usually expires in the morning, leaves only two days for companies to prepare their bids.
Although 95% of contracting authorities whose tender procedures were subject to monitoring actually disclosed information requested by means of FOI, the information they had provided were incomplete. Documents they most often omitted to disclose include those related to the market research they have conducted.
Inadequacy of “lowest price” defined as the only contract-awarding criterion and tumbling down of prices as result of mandatory e-auctions are the two biggest problems faced by companies participating in tender procedures organized and implemented on local level. More than half of companies surveyed are also facing the problem of late payment for public procurement contract performance.
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The present report is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United State Agency for International Development (USAID) within the USAID Civil Society Project.