Senator wants 'probity advisers' to oversee procurement bidding

INDEPENDENT Senator Amrita Deonarine urged the use of independent "probity advisers" to manage an emerging type of bid under procurement legislation as she spoke on Tuesday in the Senate Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property (No 2) Regulations.

These measures supply operational details of the partially-proclaimed Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property Act, 2015, such as the role of the Procurement Regulator.

The act replaces the Central Tenders Board Act.

Newsday understands that in a "two-stage" bid process, bidders first submit their technical details which are evaluated, with those successful then invited to submit their bids based on price.

However Deonarine, an economist, related a case of a procurement exercise being susceptible to questionable practices and urged a probity adviser as a solution.

She recalled a case where someone at a firm seeking to procure goods/services had been in active two-way talks to feed information to one of the bidding companies, lamenting this had happened even before the pending establishment of the two-stage process.

Deonarine urged the regulations be amended to include the use of probity advisers to oversee the integrity of the whole bidding process, saying this has been the practice in places like Canada, Australia and at the World Bank. She suggested a timeline be placed on the time for amendments to be made to the regulations.

Deonarine also urged penalties for public bodies which fail to comply with the registration requirements of the Office of Procurement Regulator as set down in procurement legislation which requires they deem certain employees as their procurement officers.

However, she also recommended that these companies be given a lot of help with up-skilling and coaching, even as she noted the many documents they were required to prepare in order to be successfully monitored for accountability and transparency in procurement. Nonetheless she lamented that some entities were "nowhere near ready" for the full proclamation of procurement legislation. She said successful modern economies worldwide were based on "fair and transparent systems."

Regarding the process for a bidder to be sanctioned by ineligibility proceedings, Deonarine lamented that the regulations at present only allow the Procurement Regulator to accept a report by a public entity's accounting officer regarding alleged impropriety. However she urged an amendment to let the Procurement Regulator carry out his/her own investigation.

Deonarine urged that the regulations spell out conditions for the use of a limited tender, whether a sole source selection (where only one entity exists which is capable of providing something) or a single source selection (where a strong justification exists for one entity to be chosen non-competitively, such as an emergency.)

To dissuade companies from easily reverting to limited tenders in the event that an open tender failed to produce a winning bidder, Deonarine urged that the regulations be amended to mandate a procuring company which had a failed bid-round to review its procedures to try again to get successful bids.