SUMMARY
Setting eligibility criteria that are inappropriate for the subject of the procurement, the estimated value of the procurement, or the market conditions is a serious problem found with local-level tenders. Such inappropriate criteria are required in nearly one third of the monitored procedures at the local level. The outcome is as follows: in 60% of these procedures, there has been, or has remained, a single tenderer; 30% of the procedures have been annulled; and in 90% of them, an e-auction has not been held. Setting inappropriate criteria is a problem with multiple negative consequences that the competent authorities must analyze separately and take adequate measures to resolve.
The statutory obligation to hold an e-auction for all public procurements, regardless of their value, is fulfilled very rarely in the case of tenders at the local level. This situation also implies a failure to implement the idea—through the mandatory holding of e-auctions-of streamlining the process when institutions are paying for goods, services, and works purchased in a public procurement procedure, on the one hand, and narrowing the opportunities to favor particular tenderers, on the other. Within the selected sample for public procurement monitoring at the local level, e-auctions were held in only 46% of the procurements. In the remaining 54%, e-auctions were not held for various reasons, the most dominant of which is the participation of only one tenderer, or several tenderers having participated but only a single one remaining at the time of the e-auction—thus rendering it inapplicable. The fact that fewer than half of the tenders fail to end in an e-auction, despite the legal obligation to that effect, notwithstanding the reasons, indicates that the reasons and purposes for this obligation will have to be reconsidered.
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This report is made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) within the USAID Civil Society Project.