By Donald Rodney
Part 4 – embracing disclosure
This penultimate Part 4 and the final Part 5, will deal with the potential for overcoming any obvious malpractice in the procurement process arising from the unpacking of information from the two published findings of PPC, described in Part 1.
Promoting transparency vs. Promoting discretion
From the material there is non-transparency in the evaluation of tenders by NPTAB. The Procurement Act has a requirement for non-price evaluation criteria to be quantified in monetary terms, and a clear inference to continue along a pathway to arrive at an indispensable scoring and ranking of bidders as an integral part of identifying the “lowest evaluated tenderer”. The exact pathway is not stipulated but NPTAB is free to institute an appropriate modality or a formula to bring together the price and non-price criteria, providing the formula is fully disclosed beforehand and promotes “fairness and transparency”. The latter is a fundamental requirement of the Act.