The procurement system in Latvia is cumbersome and bureaucratic – this lengthens the procedure and makes the system less competitive. There are not enough professional specialists, mostly they are people for whom this is one of the duties, so the quality of procurement suffers. Also in the internal affairs sector, these shortcomings have led to the fact that a third of the centralized procurements have so far ended unsuccessfully and often there is only one bidder.
Insufficient centralization
The total financial value of procurement contracts awarded in Latvia last year was 5.4 billion euros (without VAT), which is 14% of the gross domestic product. 11,252 procurements were announced, 19.2% of them were public sector institutions, 80.8% – local governments. In three years, 24% of small procurements were concluded unsuccessfully. On average, only one offer was received in 27.2% of cases (the European Commission mentions below 10% as a desirable indicator, and above 20% as undesirable).
As one of the stumbling blocks in this area, the State Audit Office (VK) points out the regulation, which, compared to Estonia and Lithuania, is much more inflexible in our country. The fact that the regulation is not user-friendly is confirmed by the following data: only 16.5% of the clients of the Procurement Supervision Bureau (IUB) recognize it as understandable.
Even for small purchases, the requirements are not simpler, the exclusion rules are not suitable for the more flexible European Union
Read the whole article in newspapers Day in the issue of Tuesday, December 17! If you want to continue reading the newspaper in printed form, you can subscribe to it+