Public procurement reform: Big brainstorming
When the Ministry of Finance posted the draft decree on public procurement on the website of the General Secretariat of the Government (SGG) to allow the public to comment on it, it certainly should not have expected a flood of comments which only reflects the concerns of the business community and their interest in public procurements which weigh almost 20% of GDP each year, representing a godsend for many companies in various sectors.
Architects represent the corporation which formulated the greatest number of criticisms of the draft piece of legislation. The criticisms cover various aspects such as the evaluation of the bids, the downward revision of the fees, the “alarming” return of over-the-counter agreements, the rating of technical proposals, and other elements.
In any case, each comment from Internet users received a response from the Ministry of Finance. At the end of the comment period, the matrix spans no less than 135 pages. Among the questions that often come up during submissions to calls for tenders is the notion of grouping (article 150), which is the form in which certain candidates tender together to reach the critical size and meet the requirements of the specifications. For legislators, capacities are not cumulative. “Each member must therefore individually present certificates of performance of similar services”.
In the preliminary draft, there was talk of asking for explanations from bidders whose prices were either abnormally low or excessive.
A net surfer suggested dismissing these candidates to “avoid the subjectivity of tender commissions or sub-commissions responsible for this issue”. In the end, “the mechanism linked to abnormally low and/or excessive unit prices has been deleted from the draft legislation”. The option adopted relates to the establishment of a system based on the reference price of the bids made up of the arithmetic mean of the project owner’s estimate and of the average of the financial bids of the selected competitors. This measure joins the proposal of the National Builders Federation. Still on the subject of the price issue, an Internet user proposed banning the practice of reducing the estimate by 20% each year compared to the price awarded the previous year because it results in a floor price which cannot no longer be offered. An observation to which the Ministry of Finance replied that “the practice of price reduction mentioned may not be grasped at the level of the draft decree on public procurement, whose Article 6 only provides the bases that should govern the establishment of the estimate of the cost of the services by the contracting authority”. Some members of the business community, in particular the National Building and Public Works Federation (FNBTP), propose to increase to 30 million MAD instead of 10 million “the threshold for the use of national calls for tenders”. An observation that will not be taken into account in the final version of the draft decree “because of the commitments made by our country within the framework of the association and free trade agreements”.
Hassan EL ARIF
