By Rawle Lucas
Public’s right to know
In keeping with the provisions of the Procurement Act of 2003, Guyana has started reporting information on contracts awarded to suppliers and contractors through the newly amended public procurement process. This is a promise made in the 2003 amended procurement law that requires all the public entities engaging in procurement to publish a variety of data on the contracts valued over G$200,000 that had gone to successful bidders. The National Procurement and Tender Board has started making this information available. Contract awards from April 2006 onwards are now easily available on the Internet for public consumption. The data include the names of attending members of the Evaluation Committee, the name of the procuring entity and a brief description of the goods or services being purchased. In addition, the Tender Administration provides, on a consistent basis, the names of the bidders, the names of their representatives attending the contract review meeting, the cost estimates of bidders, an engineer’s estimate of the project where applicable and the value of tender security provided by bidders.
While the published data is insufficient by itself to evaluate the tender process, its availability helps to bring part of the decision process and the decisions of the Evaluation Committee into public view. This is a good thing since it allows us, the potential beneficiaries of the process, to become informed about procurement decisions and be part of any dialogue on the procurement subject. As limiting as the published data is for comprehensively assessing the government’s buying process, it is possible to identify a major flaw in the employ of the single most important criterion, lowest cost, for achieving economy and efficiency. The issue of concern to me is the consistent selection of the lowest cost bids by the Evaluation Committee even though the chosen bids often diverge widely from the engineering estimates given to the Evaluation Committee to guide its selection.
