The problem of public procurement, specifically that public money is being thrown out the window or ends up in the pockets of those with a tighter relationship with the administration, has yet to be solved, although proposals have been pouring in lately. So, why would the US ambassador to Bucharest Mark Gitenstein not cite the lack of transparency of public procurement as the reason for the lack of American investments in Romania?
“We want to see more American investors in Romania, but when 90% of Romanians don’t believe in the fairness of the public procurement system, why would American investors believe in it?,” the US ambassador wondered on Tuesday at a seminar organized by the Institute for Public Policies (IPP) on transparency, efficiency and credibility of the public procurement process.
The US ranks ninth among foreign investors in Romania, with a stock of investments of EUR1.3 billion in 2010, according to statistics of the Romanian central bank.
Cristina Traila, head of the agency that regulates and monitors public procurement (ANRMAP), says the SEAP ensures 100% transparency. But, out of 12,000 contracting authorities, only 7,000 used SEAP in 2009 and 2010, according to a survey by the Institute for Public Policies (IPP).
IPP launched a survey a few weeks ago on public procurement in Romania, which says that if there had been a minimum concern for standardization, within reasonable limits, of the prices at which the authorities buy services and products through SEAP, one would have saved 23% – EUR4.5 billion on the 2009 and 2010 overall procurement budgets.
Traila says the effort of the institution she runs is to develop SEAP on a new platform (it is currently extremely difficult to use SEAP) and to bring all contracting authorities here. But the obligation to use SEAP for procurements has existed for years.
Traila on Tuesday announced that ANRMAP finalized at the beginning of the week the section of “Online forms, according to Decision 219 from 2012” on the institution’s website. This is a move towards more transparency.
As a result, the contracting authorities are forced to send to ANRMAP electronically, within 48 hours from sealing a procurement contract, a notification on the agreement signed.
Economic agents in turn can submit objections as to possible breaches of legal provisions by the contracting authorities. These measures target the limiting of the deadline by which the contracting authorities can seal contracts after the finalization of the public procurement procedure, since in the past the signing of the contracts was put off so it would eventually be signed by “the right people.”
According to the new rules announced by Cristina Traila, the contracting authority cannot delay for reasons within its control the sealing of the contract or of the frame agreement by more than seven calendar days above the legal deadline.
Liviu Voinea, director of the Group of Applied Economics (GEA), says the introduction of cost standards for all public procurement and limiting the number of contracts with the state won by a company would be a solution for putting an end to the waste of public money.
The top 50 companies that do business with the state by value of contracts won a third of the value of acquisitions between 2009 and 2010). But a representative of ANRMAP said this would be in breach of the antitrust law, which cannot put barriers to a competitor that plays fairly. Such is the law, but what is there to be done? What is there to be done when a vice-president of the Court of Accounts, the institution that checks what the administration is doing with the money, says sometimes account controllers are not allowed access to documents? This is no longer a problem of unclear laws, but a problem of law enforcement.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)