Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
bd/views-reviews/untangling-bureaucratic-procurement-
processes-1564580486
If the purchasing authority does not follow the law and rule or the bidder is
aggrieved by their decisions in some way, then the bidder can submit a
written complaint to certai n officials. Chapter 12, Clause 56 and 57 of Public
Procurement rule, 2008) procedure comprises the following: (1) The tenderer
submits the complaint to the Procuring Entity (the Project Director (PD), Line
Director (LD), Project Manager (PM), Procurement Officer, Officer assigned
for Procurement who issued the Tender or Proposal Document), (2) If the
tenderer does not receive the response within seven working days or is not
satisfied with the response then complaint can be submitted to the Head of
Procuring Entity (HOPE). HOPE should respond in three working days, (3) If
the tenderer is not satisfied with the response from HOPE, the complaint can
be submitted to the Secretary of Ministry. Secretary of Ministry should
respond within seven working days, (4) If the tenderer is still not satisfied
with the response, then the tenderer may wish to consider pursuing the
appeal through the CPTU Review Panel (RP).
The complainant can appeal to a RP only if the bidder has exhausted all of
his or her options of complai nts to the administrative authority (i.e.
Secretary) under Rule 57 of PPR-2008. The Review Panel shall issue written
decision within a maximum of 12 working days.
The review at the administrative level provides an opportunity for the
correction of mistakes, but cannot be considered as an independent review.
Very few complaints are submitted to the RP due to the high threshold and
high deposit requirements. In practice, the majority of procurement
complaints are submitted to the courts of law.
Once the complainant brings the complaint to the review committee, this last
and final step will be reviewed by an 'expert committee' composed of (1) a
senior retired government official, (2) a technical expert and another expert
may be appointed by Bangladesh Federation of Chamber of Commerce &
Industries.
The existing review and appeal processes for procurement are exceedingly
bureaucratic and multi -layered. As a result, this discourages aggrieved
tenderer/applicant from seeking legal remedies. As seen ab ove, for the same
and the one legal injury a potential participant needs to resort to a plurality of
channels. Decisions of the review panel are, however, subject to judicial
review by the Supreme Court's High Court Division (HCD). The complex
bureaucratic procedures of procurement and complaint redressing are also
under pinned by open-ended discretion, which may foster corruption.
PPA also imposes an obligation on the procuring entity to ensure that none
of its officials or members of staff is engaged in corrupt, fraudulent, collusive
or coercive practices duri ng the processes of public procurements. The
existing procurement law has, thus, sought to prevent corrupt practices likely
to be adopted both by the government officials and the participating
entities/persons.
But all these procedure are off-set with professional immunity. The Public
Procurement Act 2003 has given immunity to the purchasing officials for
protection of action taken in good faith. Section 69 from the Act reads "No
suit, prosecution or other legal proceeding shall lie against the Government
or any public servant for anything which is done or intended to be done good
faith in pursuance of this Act".
But there is no visible action of PPSC and there have been no reforms in the
laws and practice of procurement.
At the moment, the government is actively working on a new law, namely
Bangladesh Public Procurement Authority Act, 2019. Under this new law, the
authority will control, supervise and oversee government procurement. The
proposed authority will consist of the Minister for Planning as the chairman;
Secretary of Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division, Ministry of
Planning; Vice Chairman and rep resentatives from Ministries of Finance,
Law, Environment, Telecommunication and four representatives of four major
buying departments of the government. The Executive Chairman, BPPA,
IMED will be the Secretary. Unfortunately there is no room for others in the
proposed Authority other than government officials.
mssiddiqui2035@gmail.com