The JCC hereby sounds an alarm to the public that the latest move by the attorney general to signal to the press that his Office (the AGLA) is now depending on “extensive support” from the Office of Procurement Regulation (OPR), after his July 12 meeting, is disingenuous and dangerous.
The OPR has completed all of its mandates, including meeting with all relevant State agencies over the last four years. The OPR has no power to appoint procurement officers to various agencies spending public money.
The Minister of Finance has come to Parliament in every budget since 2016 indicating that procurement legislation operationalisation was imminent. This statement by the Minister of Finance in 2019 proves at least great slackness on the part of the Government: “the Ministry of Finance had arranged a meeting during this week with the Procurement Regulator to discuss the status of preparedness of Government departments and the Office of Procurement Regulation to implement the Public Procurement Act. This meeting is in keeping with the statement made by the Minister of Finance in the 2019 budget that barring unforeseen circumstances, the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property Act could be in place in the first quarter of calendar 2019. This publicly announced timeline of the first quarter of 2019 for implementation of the Act is still on track”.
Every year since, monies were allocated to various public bodies post-budget. Why have the relevant ministers and permanent secretaries not appointed procurement officers to operate within the intent of the new legislation? Instead, the tax-paying public has to accept that these public bodies continue to spend public money without independent oversight by the OPR.
The OPR has absolutely no power to do anything once the current status quo, of non-operationalisation of the PPDPA, continues. The JCC suggests that the AGLA and the Minister of Finance publicly identify all the public bodies that have demonstrated ongoing negligence or abdicated their duty to appoint procurement officers. The public is already aware that the Judiciary is one of these bodies, based on the AG’s statement on June 22.
The JCC again calls on the prime minister to take charge of this long languishing process and make good on his repeated promises to the country to implement procurement reform without further delay.
Fazir Khan
president, Joint Consultative Council for the Construction Industry
(Ref: http://www.news.gov.tt/content/misleading-and-uninformed-daily-express-editorial-public-procurement)
