Public procurements: Details of the reform

This is a  first: before adopting a draft decree within the cabinet (the Government Council), a minister presents its content to the M.P.s members of the Finance Committees of the two Chambers of Par-liament. The Ministry of Economy and Finance did so on Wednesday April 27 with the reform of the public procurement decree. Usually, the Government, jealous of its prerogatives, works in its own corner without giving the slightest importance to the opinion of the legislative power.

This time, Fouzi Lekjaâ, the Minister Delegate, in charge of the Budget, has done otherwise. By acting in this way, the Minister expresses the desire to develop transparent relations of trust with the M.P.s. This participatory approach aims to involve them in debating and making proposals to improve the text, which has not changed since 2013.
In any case, the voluminous draft decree required several months of work within the Ministry of Finance. The draft decree comprises 173 articles concerning 61 measures that this department intends to introduce in the reform of public procurements. These  measures represent 200 billion MAD per year, or 20% of GDP. For this year, the planned amount is 245 billion MAD. This constitutes 70% of the turnover of the construction sector and 80% of the transactions of the engineering sector.

• Strengthened national preference
Today, the mechanisms for granting preference to national companies in access to public contracts are limited. To change this situation, the reform proposes to introduce the national call for tenders as a new procedure, reserved for Moroccan companies, with a ceiling depending on the type of work (works, supplies and services). Thus, the reform proposes to set the ceiling at 10 million MAD for works contracts and at 1.5 million MAD for supply and service contracts. Another new measure aims to broaden the application of the national preference mechanism to also cover procurement of supplies, services, and studies.

• Improved assessment of financial bids:
The current legislation gives the tender commission discretionary powers which allow it to accept or refuse the supporting documents submitted by competitors with regard to their abnormally low bids. The draft decree introduces a measure aimed at the methodical elimination of this type of bids, as is the case for excessive bids.

• A boost for SMEs, cooperatives, and self-entrepreneurs
According to Article 156, the contracting authority is required to reserve 30% of the estimated amount of the contracts that it intends to issue for these categories of operators. An order of the Minister in charge of Finance sets the conditions and methods of implementation. Similarly, the contracting authority is required to publish at the beginning of each budget year on the public procurement portal, the list of contracts for the previous year for SMEs, cooperatives, unions of cooperatives, and selft       ttentrepreneurs.

Mohamed CHAOUI