site.bta Stakeholders Discuss New Legal Framework for Public Procurement

Stakeholders Discuss New Legal Framework for Public Procurement

Sofia, March 23 (BTA) - The draft of a new Public Procurement
Act allows tenderers to use a single declaration as an
alternative to the present requirement to submit a number of
different documents, Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister for EU
Funds and Economic Policy Tomislav Donchev said at a forum
organized by the Bulgarian Construction Chamber (BCC) here on
Monday.

The Deputy PM explained that in an open procedure, a reverse
order of handling the examination of proposals will be possible:
 opening the price tendered first, finding the tenderer who
proposed the lowest price, and if this tenderer conforms to all
requirements of the procedure, he can be declared a winner
rightaway.

Donchev said that Bulgaria is committed to transpose the new EU
public procurement directives by April 2016. "We are ambitious
to meet this commitment at least several months earlier," he
pointed out, adding that a working group is already drafting the
 new provisions of the law. "In the first place, we have that
platform reflecting the logic of the new directives, the texts
will be finalized within two months and the experience of the
lessons learnt will be implemented," the Deputy Prime Minister
noted. He argued that the existing law can no longer serve as a
legal framework and an entirely new act is needed.

The bill includes an option of a single-instance appeal before
the Commission on Protection of Competition for the procedures
below the national threshold values.

Donchev said that the new law must also address the issue of
procurements that are awarded to cooperatives of people with
disabilities without a procedure, because this practice distorts
 the market. "Such cooperatives now apply for everything,
including the development of new software solutions, and in many
 cases this is used to evade a competitive procedure and hardly
helps people with disabilities," the Deputy PM commented.

"The new law creates a legal framework for the complete
electronization of the process," he also said.

BCC Governing Council Chairman Svetoslav Glosov said that in
recent years public procurement contracts have accounted for
over 80 per cent of the construction market. Of this share,
nearly 90 per cent are procurements financed by the EU funds.

Environment and Water Minister Ivelina Vassileva and Deputy
Regional Development and Public Works Minister Denitsa Nikolova,
 who also took part in the forum, said that they support the new
 legal framework and in particular the drafting of standard
documents for the tender procedures, the elaboration of
guidelines for the establishment of criteria for evaluation of
technical proposals and the introduction of electronic auctions.
 In their opinion, this will make it possible to avoid omissions
 and errors and to reduce the risks of delays in the
implementation of projects due to numerous appeals. According to
 the managing authorities of the two operational programmes run
by their respective ministries, there are drastic cases of
delays in the finalization of tender procedures, from one and a
half years to more than two years. The most frequent
irregularities concerning public procurements are unlawful or
discriminatory selection criteria, discriminatory technical
specifications referring to rather specific standards, and
inclusion of subjective parameters in the tender evaluation
methods.