Open Letter to the Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of B&H on the draft Law on Public Procurement

Subject: Open Letter to the Members of the Parliamentary Assembly on the draft Law on Public Procurement

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are writing to you regarding to the new draft Law on Public Procurement, which is scheduled for reconsideration of the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH on 13^th March 2014.

As you are aware, and as some of you have recognized and partially supported through your own initiatives, civil society organizations and Associations of Employers of BiH have submitted considerable number of the Amendments to the Law during the public debate, since the current solutions do not provide adequate mechanisms for successful prevention of corruption and sanctioning of irresponsible participants of public procurement, as well as transparency, efficiency and rational spending of public resources.

The proposed solutions of the Civil Society Organizations represent the minimum requirements for improving the proposed anti-corruption legal solutions and they include:

–        Avoidance of discrimination against bidders on different basis;

–        Prevention of conflict of interest of persons responsible for conducting public procurement, without which there would practically be no corruption in this area;

–        Accountability and protection of whistleblowers who report irregularities in public procurement;

–        Enabling a higher level of transparency and broader social control of public procurement by publishing far more information on the Public Procurement Portal;

–        Committing all contracting authorities to publish annual procurement plans and reports on their execution;

–        Limiting the possibilities for execution of non-transparent procedures, particularly direct agreements and negotiated procedures without their publication;

–        Significant tightening of sanctions, not only for contracted authorities, because it is ultimately paid by taxpayers, but also for the responsible persons in the contracting authority, as well as the bidders and their responsible persons, who usually make the most of corruptive profit.

Unfortunately, after the public debate and the amendment phase, the current policy agreed and re-captured the adoption process, which was demonstrated on the last session of the Committee on Budget and Finances of the House of Representatives in the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH, and their adoption of the purely cosmetic Amendments to draft the Law.

We want to remind you once more that all the countries in the region have included the anti-corruption mechanisms to the new laws on public procurement in the past few years, which for the short period of time have radically increased the level of transparency, accountability and competitiveness in this area.

Failure to adopt the proposed amendments to the Law would be the step back and re-confirmation of the lack of political will to fight against corruption. Therefore, we appeal to all Members of the Parliamentary Assembly to act on tomorrow’s session ethically and responsibly, to protect the public interest and prevent the damage which corruption in public procurement can cause to the budgets at all levels in BiH.