Centralized procurement, unable to overcome the standard

Many commodity and service groups are in the list of the centralized procurement. Picture: The Internet.

In the documents sent to the constituents of provinces, cities, the Ministry of Finance has given many regulations such as resolutions of the Government, Decisions of the Prime Minister, circulars of the Ministry of Finance… to institutionalize the Party’s policy on strengthening the fight against corruption and waste on the management of public assets.

Publicize procurement of public assets

According to the Ministry of Finance, the implementation of the centralized procurement of assets from the State budget to solve the problems of purchasing non-demand assets, exceeding the negative and norms that may arise in public procurement activities. The centralized procurement will contribute to ensure the transparency, including publicize commissions from the procurement and meet the requirements of modern equipment, synchronous assets.

Thanks to that, the management manner has also changed in the direction of administrative reforms, limiting unprofessional units to procure assets, reducing the time and facilitating the procurement in accordance with law, reducing costs and contributing to the fight against corruption and waste.

The centralized procurement of assets from the State budget is implemented at two levels: the national and ministerial, branch and local levels. In particular, the centralized procurement at the national level is applied to cars (except cars serving senior officials of the Party, and State; and specialized cars attached special – use equipment; cars with special structure to meet the professional requirements, special – use cars at the people’s armed forces). Commodity assets are applied the centralized procurement at ministries, branches, and localities that are decided by ministries, localities.

Currently, the centralized procurement is implemented by one of two ways: under the framework agreement or under the direct contraction.

The process of the procurement from State budget under the framework agreement includes 11 stages that are defined clearly. From the preparation, approval of the procurement’s estimates of assets; to summarizing the need for the centralized procurement, contractor selection, signing, guarantee… Specifically, it is strictly prohibited to divide the project, estimates of the procurement into packages in accordance with the regulations with the aim of limiting the participation of contractors.

Thus, the procurement unit takes responsible for signing the framework agreement on the basis of the needs and estimates of the asset user unit and the norms of the assets. The asset user unit is fully proactive in proposing the required assets, including technical requirements, the value of assets, and signs the contract for receiving the assets and takes actively payments from its budget.

On the basis of these strict regulations, the Ministry of Finance confirms: There is no procurement of assets that do not meet the requirements or exceed the prescribed norms. “The bidding process is fully compliant with the law on bidding and is implemented in a strict, transparent and transparent order, from the stage of preparing bidding documents, contractor selection planning, the division of the packages,” the Ministry of Finance's written response to the constituents’ commendations.

Great savings on the budget spending

In the fact of the pilot implementation, it is possible to confirm that the procurement of assets from the State budget under the centralized procurement is a “valuable” method against corruption, waste in the public procurement.

According to the Ministry of Finance, since the pilot implementation in 24 ministries, branches, localities in 2008 to 2016, it had been taken great savings on the state budget. According to a statistic, the difference between the estimates and the actual number of procurement of ministries, branches, localities participating in the pilot was over 467 billion vnd.

The Ministry of Finance estimates that, if the centralized procurement is implemented for the whole commodities and services, the State budget will save about 30 trillion vnd each year.

The effect is not only reflected in the reduction in spending, but it is also on the good quality of the inputs, unified price, and technical similarities. If we expand the scope of application, the difference in money and the efficiency of public procurement will be much larger.

More importantly, the implementation of centralized procurement at ministries, branches and localities will overcome the situation of over-standard procurement, norms, and ineffectiveness; limit the negative and wrong-doing in public procurement.