Parliament must modify the Law on Public Procurement, especially as regards the conflicts of interests of persons who prepare the public procurement procedures. Such a recommendation is contained in the third government procurement monitoring report presented by the Association for Efficient and Responsible Governance (AGER) and the Journalistic Investigations Center, IPN reports.
Olesea Stamate, one of the authors of the report on behalf of AGER, said the Government decision on the documents that civil society must present to take part in the procedure for organizing public procurement should be modified so as to maximally simplify this process.
According to Cornelia Cozonac, head of the Journalistic Investigations Center, the larger the acquisition is, the higher the number of identified violations is. “There are usually interests when they offer large amounts of money. During two years, we had investigated how the money within public procurement reaches the reserves of political parties. This year we cannot conduct such investigations because the authorities took measures to hamper access to such information. The workplace of the persons who donate money to parties is hachured in statements and we cannot make a connection between the public procurement and the donations made to parties,” said the journalist.
During May – September 2016, partner organizations of the project monitored 162 public procurement procedures. This number is lower than the planned one owing to the smaller budget and to the barring of access to information about government procurement by particular public authorities.
The report was produced within the project “Public Money is My Money too!” that is implemented with EU support.