Publish Date : 06-Jun-2018
Considering the fact that public procurement issue is an important one and there have been very many questions since our last presentation on how the Government intends to amend the legislative framework on public procurement, I deemed it necessary to have one more presentation on what is to be approved on tomorrow and next weeks Cabinet meeting, for all who are following us and are interested in having an overview of everything that means amendments to public procurement.
The Governments decision stemmed from the situation we all know for years, that almost full deadlock over public procurement, deadlocks which surely cost us a great deal of money from state budget and not only, loans and even European money or especially European money. We intend to make these amendments that would bring a necessary simplification in public money spending, start of large investment projects.
It has been talked a lot unfortunately, and in an unjustified way, about the alleged lack of public consultation or public debate process, which is not fair. I can tell you that there have been talks with all associative structures- the Association of Romanian Towns, the Association of Municipalities, the National Union of County Councils in Romania, the Association of Experts in Public Procurement, employers in fields such as: construction, services, IT & C, Coalition for Romanias development. Therefore, there has been a broad consultation process for months and what the Government is adopting is the result of this public debate. There is also the agreement of the European Commission on everything the Government is amending it amended last week on the Cabinet meeting, it amends on tomorrows Cabinet meeting and, of course, on the next Cabinet meeting, an emergency ordinance and a Government decision, therefore, norms for the implementation of these primary documents.
A very important element consists in the fact that the direct procurement that we legislated in Romania, in a very restrictive way, used to lead to a resource expense of about 30% for procurement of 8% from the budget of some contracting authorities. Therefore, we spent a lot of resources for rather insignificant procurement. And this is one of the reasons why the legislative framework is changing these days.
We also talked about a centralized structure within the Ministry of Finance, in fact, a structure that would make public procurement in a centralized way, a concept that was further used over the past years and produced the expected effects. Here are many arguments conducive to such a decision, but we will talk during our presentation and I will start very briefly, so as not to take too much of your time.
First of all, I mentioned a large number of complaints. And I can give you a figure to see exactly what that national sport of lodging complaints means in Romania. We had approximately 3,800 complaints annually at CNSC; this means somewhere, on average, a complaint per day. So far, there were and are, in Romania, companies that had this practice as a priority to challenge anything for the sake of challenging, which, of course, led to delays and non-spending of public money and especially the non-production of those expected effects in the economy. It was a strange situation: there were decisions of the National Council for Contestations, decisions that varied, for the same case, we had different decisions; or within a public procurement procedure on multiple lots, the same company could expect a decision of being removed on a lot and on another lot, within the same auction, the same highway, for example, not to be removed , for the same reasons, which, of course, created an unpleasant situation.
There are very many structures with control responsibilities, and this must stop in Romania, to have a great deal of earmarked resources and responsibilities on control area, and less on the area which should produce these effects in economy, starting from public procurements up to expenditure and not only. Therefore, this will radically change.
We have, as I said, overregulation, an excess of regulation on everything that meant the national procedure below the thresholds that the directive mentioned. Nobody has asked them to do so, but as I said, this custom, to say so, at the level of the public structures, led to an excessive number of procedures, tasks that were only hindrances, with negative effects in the economy. This - you'll see in the presentation - has been removed. But, of course, a change is being made in correlation with other legislative provisions from normative acts. I give you an example: Executive Decision 907/ 2016, on development stages and the framework contents of feasibility studies. There were many normative acts with various provisions that eventually led to a halt, to even unpleasant conclusions from audit structures, national or European ones. There were very many delays in the tender evaluation and winners designation. The insufficient staff within the public procurement central structure, who could not be present as law provides, to all public procurement procedures, and therefore, led to unjustified slowdown in these evaluation stages. This thing too changed, the role of National Agency was simplified and there is not anymore that obligation to be present as representative of the National Public Procurement Agency to each stage, presence which was compulsory until yesterday. Direct procurement were blocked as it was compulsory to go in the electronic system for any small procurement, immediately necessary. Alike, for a long and unjustified time, of course, delays in effective payments.
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