The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) will use next week’s National Procurement Symposium to address persistent complaints by unsuccessful bidders who are not being notified, in keeping with the law, when contracts are awarded.
The Procurement Act stipulates that procuring entities notify bidders of contract awards in addition to making them public within seven days of the awards.
An NPTAB official explained to Stabroek News that while that agency facilitates the opening of tenders and is responsible for sending tenders after evaluation to Cabinet for its ‘no objection’, there is no legal mechanism in place that compels the agency to enforce the notification process. It is the duty of the procuring entities to carry out this process and as a result NPTAB will use the symposium to reiterate previous calls that this be done.
“There is nothing in the [Procurement Act] that we can do that would get the agencies to notify the bidders of the contract award. All we can do is urge them, keep reiterating to them…we can’t beat on their heads either,” the official said.
Many companies have bemoaned the negligence by procurement agencies in notifying them of the award of the contract for which they would have made bids.
Stabroek News spoke with some companies that regularly bid for government contracts and they expressed disappointment at never being notified of awards. “Everyone knows that you know about the contract only if you win and if you didn’t get a call, over a certain time, know you didn’t win and mek yuh ites and move on to the next one and hope for better luck,” one contractor said.
“No one addresses the fact that it is unlawful because, admitting so myself, people know that you will be targeted for speaking up and that might very well be your last contract if you decide to talk up. So, we let it ride,” the representative of a popular contracting entity posited.
“Local Government [Ministry] would sometimes call and say, ‘Well, you didn’t win.’ But I don’t know if is ’cause I have a partner there… Public Works, they is call sometimes. But to say I get a letter from any of them or see anything publish, nah. You hear when Luncheon say something and they papers got it,” the representative added.
While Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon at his weekly post-Cabinet press briefings announces contracts that have been given Cabinet’s No Objection, the NPTAB official said that this does not satisfy the requirements of the notifications stipulated in the law.
One contractor opined that in addition to being targeted, companies may not have objected because they are not aware that by law it was procuring entities’ responsibility to notify them.
According to the law, after bids are opened at the NPTAB, the respective procuring entities collect them and give them to an evaluation committee to be evaluated for a recommendation. “The Evaluation Committee shall, using only the evaluation criteria outlined in the tender documents, evaluate all tenders, determine which tenderer has submitted the lowest evaluated tender, and convey its recommendation to the procuring entity within a reasonable period of time, but not longer than fourteen days. The procuring entity shall, if it agrees with the Report of the Evaluation Com-mittee, publicly disclose the name of the tenderer identified by the Evaluation Committee as the lowest evaluated tenderer. If the procuring entity does not agree with the Evaluation Committee’s determination, the procuring entity shall issue an advisory recommendation to the Evaluation Commit-tee regarding which bidder should be the lowest evaluated bidder, which recommendation the Evaluation Committee shall observe,” the act states.
The NPTAB official said from there that agency submits to Cabinet the contract, if it is over $15 million, for its’ No Objection and a document is sent along with the contract stating cabinet’s position. “It is a documented pro-cess… as stipulated by the act… we send to Cabinet a document and they send to us documentation of their decision… we, in turn, will send an official document to the procuring entity and then from there it’s up to them,” the official explained.
Recently, the controversial selection of the New GPC as the lone pre-qualified bidder for the supply of drugs saw the issue of a failure to notify bidders of the decision being submitted as evidence as part of litigation brought against that procuring entity, the Ministry of Health. Inter-national Pharmaceutical Agency (IPA) moved to the courts to nullify the declaration of New GPC as the lone drug supplier for the country and in the court documents cited the ministry’s violation in not notifying the company of the contract award. The company says that it only learned of the contract award to the New GPC through the media on a reported announcement made by Luncheon in July.
