– Goolsarran
Former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran has dubbed the award of the US$18.1 million contract for the specialty hospital flawed, saying that Surendra Engineering’s lack of experience should have prevented it from being selected the winner.
“This makes no sense. It is common sense, really, if you have two bidders to do a job; one hasn’t gotten the experience and one teams up with an agency, [and] forms a consortium that has a wealth of experience.
Who would you go for?” Goolsarran told Stabroek News in an invited comment yesterday, while reiterating the need for the establishment of the Public Procurement Commission (PPC) to avoid controversies surrounding the award of contracts.
“It doesn’t stand to reason that one would give the contract to an inexperienced company over one who formed a partnership with a company that specialises in building of hospitals. There is nothing in the Procurement Act that says you cannot form a consortium to do this… when you go into the bidding documents, [they] permit a firm to form an alliance. So, if the ministry objects to this then it is a violation of the bidding document and the Procurement Act,” he added.
Surendra won the contract to build, equip and design the specialty hospital at Turkeyen, East Coast Demerara, over another Indian bidder, Fedders Lloyd. Following the announcement of the award of the contract, Fedders Lloyd charged that the procurement process was improper.
The Ministry of Health, however, is still to provide answers to key issues about the evaluation process, including why a company with no major hospital building experience was chosen.
The Ministry of Health had formally responded to Fedders Lloyd’s concerns about the award of the contract, saying it had openly and transparently assessed the “best offer” made to the country. The response was sent to the company a day before Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon announced that the awarding would be reassessed. However, it remains unknown who is undertaking the review.
Goolsarran considered the situation in his weekly Accountability Watch column in Stabroek News on Monday, noting that the Ministry of Health failed to take into account the fact that Fedders Lloyd formed of a consortium with NOUS Hospitals for the purpose of bidding for the contract. “In addition, the lack of requisite experience should have prevented Surendra Corporation from winning the award,” he added, while saying the situation raised serious questions about not only the functioning of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) and the various evaluation committees but also the appointment, competence and independence of their members.
In the absence of an operational PPC, he further noted, problems in public procurement will continue to occur and there is no oversight mechanism for the work of the NPTAB.
“This reluctance by government to establish the Public Procurement Commis-sion will be the cause of continued problems at NPTAB. We will continue to have problems… you can have the best of the rules but it all boils down to the people who have to do the evaluation of these tenders,” Goolsarran told Stabroek News in an invited comment. “How competent are they?
How independent? How professionally competent? How regularly do we rotate them? Or are they going to be there for life? And also what is with their names not being public?” he questioned.
According to Goolsarran, members of the NPTAB need to be rotated to avoid “getting too comfortable” and “aligning themselves with bidders and contractors.” He opined that they should be given contracts of three years per term and not allowed to sit on the board for more than two terms.
“After two terms, they will end up getting cozy with contractors, which will end up biasing their judgments. There has to be some safeguard… some are currently absent and some not functioning,” he said.
He also questioned whether the composition of the evaluation committee is a state secret, while pointing out that no one knows who the members are.
“Who is answerable when we don’t know who these people are?” he questioned. “If we had a Procurement Commission they would be accountable to them as they perform one of their main functions to watch over and investigate,” he added.
