-Teixeira
Presidential advisor on governance Gail Teixeira says government prefers a consensus approach in finalising the nominees for the long-delayed Public Procurement Commission (PPC) before the process goes to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
Controversies surrounding the award of large government contracts have seen frequent calls for the establishment of the PPC over the last decade, during which time the nomination process has been stalled at the parliamentary level
“The agreement was that the parties will meet and submit names and go to the PAC [already having consensus],” Teixeira said in a comment to Stabroek News last week.
Asked what government’s next move with regards to the PPC is, Teixeira said that she is unaware whether any meeting has been planned for this purpose. However, she said that the methodology of trying to find consensus before reaching to the stage of the PAC is the preferred way to go.
She said that the PAC wrote all parties reminding them of the need to move forward on the agreements met during the budget discussions and asking them to submit names for the PPC.
Noting that the June deadline has long since passed, Teixeira said that the Alliance for Change has since publicly announced its two nominations for the PPC. As far as she could recall, Teixeira said that main opposition APNU has not submitted its names to the PAC.
Teixeira, in July 17, had said that the government is ready with its list of nominees for the PPC and accused the opposition of holding up the selection process.
The AFC has put forward chartered accountant Christopher Ram and former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran to be its nominees for the PPC.
The constitution states that the PPC shall consist of five members who shall have expertise and experience in procurement, legal, financial and administrative matters. It said too that the President shall appoint the members of the commission after they have been nominated by the PAC.
Speaking to this newspaper yesterday, APNU MP Carl Greenidge, who chairs the PAC, said that the nomination process for the PPC has not gone any further than it was before the start of the parliamentary recess. “We are still waiting on the parties to submit their names. We could look at that in the next two weeks [in the PAC],” he said. “I will expect that we will know what is happening on the procurement commission front in the next month,” he said.
In mid-August, Greenidge had said he expected parties to submit names by the end of the recess in October. At that time, he said that the PAC was still awaiting the names.
He said that while he expected the names to come, he did not envisage that being as much as a problem as the method of selection of the persons to the PPC.
“You need a method of selection that is not going to result in any one political party vetoing a competent and credible candidate for the commission for political reasons. The mechanism for selection should not allow that,” said Greenidge in August.
He said that the PAC needs to be in a situation where objectively, a set of persons can sit down and select the persons. At the time, he said that he was looking at examples in other countries to “see what it is that they do in tricky situations.” He said that one example is to take an international entity or a firm of accountants or auditors who deal with procurement and have them review the resumes of nominees, look at the experience of the persons and then choose one based purely on technical criteria and experience. “In that sense it doesn’t matter who nominates, what matters is how they are chosen and that to me is the more important consideration,” he had told this newspaper.
On May 10, Minister of Foreign Affairs Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett gave a commitment in the National Assembly that that the Public Procurement Commission would be established by the end of June 2012.
The PPC will specifically have oversight over the procedures of ministerial, regional and national procurement entities as well as those of project execution units. It will also be responsible for investigating complaints from suppliers, contractors and public entities and cases of irregularities and mismanagement, with the power to propose remedial action in all instances.
