Tenders Board must go

With legal loopholes and inefficiency becoming the norm in  its operations,  the Government is being urged to repeal the Central Tenders Board Ordinance. In essence, this would strip the Tenders Board of its powers. That’s one of the first things to accomplish if proper reform of the Government’s procurement regime is to take place, a Green Paper prepared for public discussion, said. Apart from developing a code of ethics for procurement officers, the paper called for decentralisation of the current procurement process. These are just some of the six recommendations from the ten-member Procurement Reform Committee. The Green Paper identifies four areas of weakness in the present system : deficiencies in the legal and regulatory framework; human resource limitations; lack of general oversight and inadequate public information.

The Green Paper proposes that public procurement should include both the prior design stage, scope of works determined, costs estimated and bid packages prepared as well as the subsequent implementation stage in which performance of the contract is managed. The Central Tenders Board (CTB) came into being in 1961 to try to bring efficiency, transparency and accountability  to the management of public procurement.” Since that time however, it has been playing “an exceedingly diminished role.” In 1971, for instance, the Ordinance was amended to allow the Government to act on its own behalf, allowing increased powers of the CTB to appoint consultants.

In 1991, too, an amendment provided for a Special Ministerial Tenders Committee to be established at the Ministry of National Security to procure arms, ammunition and equipment for the Defence Force and Protective Services. Two years later, another amendment validated the National Insurance Property Development Company (NIPDEC) as a procurement agency for Government, outside the ambit of the CTB. Additionally, there had been further decentralisation of the procurement with the establishment of new statutory corporations and the removal of some earlier established statutory bodies from the purview of the CTB. Considering the three legislative models effecting current best practice, the Green Paper suggests that the most appropriate model for Trinidad and Tobago is the Principle Model.

In this model, the law prescribes the operating principle underlying procurement that promotes best procurement practice. But to implement this model, the Ordinance and its subsidiary legislation must be repealed and replaced by a new Act that will treat with the legal framework and prescribe the operating principles. For the proposed Principle Model to work properly, the Green Paper recommends the repeal of the Central Tenders Board Ordinance and decentralisation of the current procurement practices. There will also be need to appoint an independent regulator, to monitor and audit the process of all state agencies spending public money and who must establish a central procurement database with information on procurement opportunities, process, contract awards and prices; establish a national training programme for public and private sectors; train and certify procurement experts; and develop a code of ethics for procurement officers.