Institute of Development and freedom of Information publishes a report about Public Procurement during the last year.

“The aim of the Transparent Public Procurement Report 2020 is to present the evaluations of Public Procurement Legislations of member countries of TPPR Network, ascertain the main statistical trends, highlight the weakest and strongest performing areas of public procurement, and name the best and the worst performing countries in regards to the transparency and accountability of their respective public procurement systems.
 

Main Findings
 

- Public Procurement Legislation of nearly all evaluated countries lay out the basic principles and general framework of the procurement process, makes it operational and indicates how the law must be applied to specific circumstances;
 
- In most of the cases, public procurement legislation is accessible in a single governmental website, however, access to these documents in an electronic machine-readable format still constitutes a challenge in many participant countries;
 
- Public procurement legislation in all evaluated countries apply to all state budget entities and local government entities, however, the approach varies when it comes to applying the legislation to Legal Entities of Public Law (LEPL), state-owned companies and state non-commercial legal entities;
 
- The scope of coverage of public procurement legislation in various countries includes all sectors of the economy where competition is possible and exemptions are clearly listed in the legislation;
 
- In all cases there is a single or several state bodies responsible for managing public procurement, however, in most of the cases these bodies are not entitled to have own income in addition to state funding;
 
- In many cases electronic means still do not constitute the primary method of conducting public procurement;
 
- In a number of cases legislation sets preferences for domestic suppliers;
 
- In all participants countries, the legislation ensures the right to review in the procurement process for tender participants, however, problems are evident in regards to applying the right to potential suppliers as well as to the general public;
 
- In most of the cases, there is an independent review body in the country with the authority to review complaints and grant remedies, however, civil society members are usually excluded from its composition.
 

Findings by the Stages of Public Procurement Process
 

- Most of the TPPR participant countries demonstrated a lack of transparency at the post-tendering stage of public procurement compared to the earlier stages of pre-tendering and tendering;
 
- Publishing information on sub-contractors, contract amendments as well as contract performance indicators proved to be particularly problematic;
 
- Countries usually publish information on tender notices, however, access to the information in a machine-readable format is highly limited;
 
- In cases when evaluation criteria include both price and quality, the winner is rarely chosen
 
- using a cost-effectivenessapproach consisting of three factors: life-cycle cost, bestprice-quality ration, environmental and/or social costs;
 
- Access to submitted complaints and dispute resolution is problematic, especially in machine-readable electronic format;
 
- Public procurement annual plans are still not published by many TPPR participant countries.
 

Findings by the Benchmark Indicators
 
- Among the six benchmark indicators, Transparency proved to be the most problematic direction of public procurement regulations among the countries covered by TPPR. This is largely explained by the fact that states still face significant problems in the direction of publishing post-tendering information. As for the pre-tendering and tendering phases, information is rarely published in electronic machine-readable format;
 
- Lower scores in the benchmark indicator of Transparency were one of the major factors negatively affecting the overall evaluations of the countries;
 
- The least problematic benchmark indicator was the Uniformity of the Legislative Framework since most of the TPPR participant countries have adopted the legislation directed at regulating public procurement, which includes the main principles of conducting state purchases and the legislation is applicable to a wide range of actors determined by the legislation;
 
- Competitiveness and Impartiality proved to be another well-performing benchmark indicator, which can be explained by the fact that most of the legislations in TPPR participant countries avoid including in itself regulations that would threaten competitiveness and impartiality. However, the picture of implementing these regulations inpractice could be significantly different”, - reads the report.