On Friday, the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) responded to an editorial that appeared in Tuesday’s edition of Stabroek News which had raised questions about the award to Kares Engineering Inc of the contract for the construction of the North Ruimveldt Secondary School.
The editorial had questioned the selection of Kares in light of its disastrous performance on the 2013 contract for the construction of the Kato Secondary School which concluded in 2015. The school was found to be riddled with major defects after the construction and required massive remedial works before it could be safely occupied by students.
From the outset it must be recognised that the NPTAB’s decision to respond to the editorial with facts represents transparent and enlightened governance and the agency is to be commended for this. It is this type of responsiveness and accountability that enables citizens to believe that they have a role to play in governance in accord with the intent of Article 13 of the Constitution.
One could contrast the NPTAB’s response with that of the Office of the Commissioner of Information and the Ministry of Housing in relation to the opaque engagement of Impressions Inc to provide services for the recently concluded International Building Expo. Despite the determined efforts of citizen Jonathan Yearwood, neither the Commissioner of Information nor Minister of Housing Collin Croal has provided an iota of useful information on this engagement and related matters.
Aside from Kares’ track record its bid was also only the third lowest, raising the obvious question of what happened to the two lower ones. The NPTAB’s statement said that both of these bids failed to comply with key criteria applied by its evaluation committee and were therefore deemed non-responsive.
In one case, the bidder failed to comply with Criterion H pertaining to the demonstration of specific construction experience, Criterion P relating to the ownership and/or possession of key equipment and Criterion I which deals with evidence of financial capacity.
The other bidder was non-responsive on the grounds of non-compliance with Criterion H and Criterion O, which pertains to whether the bidder had any terminated or abandoned projects within the last three years. The NPTAB said that this bidder did have an abandoned project which it failed to mention.
One could certainly accept the argument that the responsiveness of bids is predicated on whether they are compliant with all of the evaluation criteria that the committees have to work with. Of course, these criteria have to be scrupulously applied to all of the bidders and there should be no leeway for these to be eased or a blind eye turned.
There is one significant weakness in the NPTAB response that still doesn’t excuse the award to Kares without being assured of its ability to competently execute the project. The NPTAB stated that in relation to one of the bids deemed non-responsive, the bidder had not declared that it had had a terminated or abandoned project within the last three years. The NPTAB said that the bidder did indeed have an abandoned project “which they failed to mention”.
How did the evaluation committee learn about this abandoned project? One would now assume that the evaluation committee did background checks on all nine bidders. That is the only possible way it would know about the abandoned project unless it was advised of this by the NPTAB itself. It would be good to know exactly what methodology was pursued by the evaluation committee.
Nonetheless, the determination that one bidder had not declared an abandoned project should have also led the evaluation committee on the path of discovery that Kares had an even bigger red flag – a poorly constructed school that posed dangers which had to be remediated at its own cost. There is no comparison between an abandoned project and a poorly constructed one. There could be any number of reasons why a project was abandoned and that matter could be presumably ventilated further. However, the evaluation committee did not have to dig very far to unearth Kares’ poor performance on the Kato project.
NPTAB may well say that the evaluation criteria do not apply to projects older than four years or even to ones that were poorly constructed. That would, however, mean that the evaluation guidelines are deficient and need at least to take the fullest account of the bidders’ performance on similar projects. At the very least there should have been some mechanism to determine whether Kares had upgraded its capacity since the 2013 debacle and whether it could be considered responsive in that sense.
The criteria which the evaluation committees are applying definitely need revisiting and the NPTAB must continuously seek to ensure that the committees are well-insulated from undue influence.
