Procurement commission process slow – MP Patterson

The tidying up of the five-year old list of proposed names to serve on the Public Procurement Commission (PPC) is moving at a slow pace, according to one member of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament.

david.jpgDavid Patterson of the Alliance For Change (AFC) said that since the names were submitted in 2003, some of the nominees have moved on while at least one of them has died.An official from the World Bank recently commented on the need to have the PPC in place so that aggrieved participants in the procurement process could seek redress. Alejandro Cedeno, Commu-nications Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean said that the Bank has reminded the Government here of the need to have such a body in place.

The constituting of the Board of the PPC has always been a bugbear in the negotiation process, which is more than four years old now. The accelerated work of the PAC was in response to the agreement made in the National Stakeholder Consultations held in February and which gave a 90-day time-frame by which time a number of commitments would have been implemented. But the Communiqué coming out of the consultations only called for the appointment of the Commissioners to the PPC, not for the establishment of the Commission itself.

Since the passage of the Procurement Act 2003, the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) has been set up and is functioning in administering public procurement on a national level with oversight of regional procurement.

Patterson said that the PAC is working to have the names individually checked off before the process can move forward. He said too that replacements for those who have either moved on or passed away have to be addressed as well.

Patterson said that work on the names will recommence during the next sitting of the PAC. He said that after the process of sanitising the list of names there will have to be consensus on the names to be chosen to actually sit on the PPC and this will take about two or three meetings of the PAC to complete.

He emphasised that the PAC will be seeking to choose the five best people for the job and this would not necessarily be based on whether the person was nominated by the governing PPP/C or Opposition.

This newspaper understands that even if the PAC completes its work on the selection of the final five, these names will remain undisclosed until the establishment of the PPC in terms of a fully funded and functioning entity.

The President will at the end of the process swear in the members to the PPC, but first the Commission has to be established, staffed and budgeted for.

Patterson said that it is likely that a supplementary provision will be made some time this year for the PPC, since it wasn’t catered for in the National Budget.

The setting up of the PPC was one of the decisions coming out of the Constitutional Reform Commission. But it was with the progress of the Constructive Engagement between President Bharrat Jagdeo and Leader of the Opposition Robert Corbin that the matter was given attention with its inclusion in the 2003 Communiqué as one of the commitments undertaken.

Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon in April had said that Government was pressing ahead with implementing all of the commitments made in the February 2008 stakeholder consultation. He had said too that Government was pressing for the establishment of all Constitutional bodies as agreed in the stakeholder process.