Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia : Country Procurement Assessment Report
The emergency nature of many of the measures taken to meet the challenges which Macedonia has faced in recent years, including the Kosovo crisis and the recent threat to the country's security, has contributed to a general laxity in the enforc...
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| Format: | Country Procurement Assessment (CPAR) |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Washington, DC
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2002/06/3357252/former-yugoslav-republic-macedonia-country-procurement-assessment-report http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15307 |
| Summary: | The emergency nature of many of the
measures taken to meet the challenges which Macedonia has
faced in recent years, including the Kosovo crisis and the
recent threat to the country's security, has
contributed to a general laxity in the enforcement of the
country's laws, including the LPP. Compliance with the
procurement law has been further undermined by the absence
of the institutional machinery necessary to support
implementation, particularly an authoritative body to
oversee enforcement and provide institutions operating
under the law with guidance on its application. Whilst the
Ministry of Finance (MOF) is formally charged with authority
over public procurement, it is only recently that MOF has
dedicated resources to perform key oversight functions. That
said, the MOF unit charged with this onerous obligation, the
Public Procurement Division of the Ministry's Legal
Department, lacks the stature and capacity to discharge its
functions effectively. Furthermore, the institutions which
should play an indispensable role in performing oversight of
public procurement, including the State Auditor's
Office, have not yet been operating effectively. Weak
enforcement is further exacerbated by a low level of
awareness of the law's provisions, the roots of which
lie partly in inadequate dissemination, and by the absence
of sufficient numbers of public officials trained in
procurement, a shortcoming which is particularly acute in
self-governing units of local government. Most public
officials who carry out procurement are inexperienced and
lack the procurement-specific training necessary to apply
the law accurately. There is also a severe problem of
excessive political interference in contract award decisions
in Macedonia. This is not only invited by the absence of an
effective oversight institution but is, in fact, formalized
by the common practice, enshrined in the LPP, of assigning
to high-ranking political officials, in particular
Ministers, the authority to award procurement contracts. The
assessment also found evidence of many bad practices which
are routinely applied to procurement in Macedonia. Principal
among these is that, instead of providing bidders with
formal, written bidding documents, public purchasers often
only advertise an invitation to bid in a local newspaper as
the sole means for soliciting bids. Such advertisements
regularly include the cost estimate for the contract being
tendered, the publication of which may facilitate collusion
and price-fixing among bidders. Other practices which
obstruct transparency include failing to disclose bid
evaluation criteria to bidders in advance, the widespread
use of subjective methods of evaluating bids and over-use of
an "accelerated procedure" provision in the LPP,
by which the period allowed to bidders to prepare their bids
may be reduced from 36 days to 15 days or less. This is
clearly open to manipulation by purchasers who want to give
an unfair advantage to a favored bidder. Several more
examples of bad practices identified by the assessment are
provided in Section 2 of this report, with detailed
recommendations to address them presented in Section 2.3.
In order to address these weaknesses, this report recommends
a number of short- term measures, designed to plug the most
pressing gaps in Macedonia's national public
procurement system, combined with longer-term
recommendations aimed at more wide-reaching reform and
development of the legal and institutional framework for procurement. |
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