Report Reveals Mass Violation Of Public Procurement Law

Over 70% of public institutions in Ghana have failed to comply with the public procurement law which mandates entities to submit a procurement plan, head of Public Relations at the Public Procurement Authority has said.

As if that is not enough, it has also emerged that even for the few entities who submit their procurement plans to the Authority, the budget releases to them are completely different from the plans they provide, Rhoda Appiah told Myjoyonline.com.

This paints a grim picture of the implementation of the law that is meant to fight corruption, particularly, political corruption in the form of clientelism and patronage.

An investigation conducted by Myjoyonline.com together with an independent auditor and governance researcher, Dr Valentine Mensah, shows that as at January 2018, only 96 entities, out of over 1,000 procurement entities in the country had complied with section 21 of Public Procurement Act, the law that requires all public entities to submit their procurement plans to the Authority, a situation which is a complete violation of the law.

The investigation shows that key institutions, including the Ministry of Communications, Ministry of Justice and Attorney General’s Department, Auditor General’s Department, Electoral Commission did not strictly comply with the law consistently in both 2017 and 2018.

These revelations come at a time when allegations of procurement breaches have been made against various entity heads at the Ministry of Communications and National Communications Authority over the KelniGVG contract as well as the Ghana Cylinder Manufacturing Company and the Electoral Commission which led to the dismissal of the former Electoral Commission.

None of these procurement entities submitted a procurement plan to the Authority by January as required by law.

As the former Sports Minister, Afriyie Ankrah, ‘confessed’ last month dubious contracts are sometimes awarded to businessmen and sponsors of political parties as favours (clientelism and patronage), which by implication are in breach of the procurement law.

Some of these dubious contracts are examples of corruption in public procurement which cause inefficiencies in the public sector.

The law
Article 21 of the Public Procurement Act 663 states: “A procurement entity shall prepare a procurement plan to support its approved programme and the plan shall indicate (a) contract packages, (b) estimated cost for each package, (c) the procurement method, and (d) processing steps and times.”

Article 21(2) continues that “a procurement entity shall submit to its Tender Committee not later than one month to the end of the financial year the procurement plan for the following year for approval and shall post the procurement plan on the website of the authority.

Finally, 21 (3) states that “after budget approval and at quarterly intervals after that, each procurement entity shall submit an update of the procurement plan to the Tender Committee.”

Breaches
The procurement plan is expected to begin the whole procurement process.

Explaining how important the procurement plan is, the head of Public Relations at the Procurement Authority, Mrs Rhoda Appiah said:

“Procurement plan is a requirement as far as best practice in public procurement is concerned all across the world. In fact planning is an essential part of life and the mantra goes that failure to plan is planning to fail,” she told Myjoyonline.com.

Despite the importance of the procurement plan majority of the procurement entities are violating it with impunity.

As at April 2018, the number of procurement entities that had submitted their plans to the Authority had increased from 96 to 290, which still falls way below expectation. The Ministry of Communication which violated the law in January submitted its plan in the second quarter.

According to Mrs Rhoda Appiah, the few entities that submitted their plans did not even go according to the plan.

“We have realized that the disbursement of the budget releases that are done at the Ministry of Finance has no recourse to the procurement plan. There is no marriage between these two systems,” she said.

She added that the PPA cannot sit and watch the entities flagrantly violate the law and has, therefore, taken steps including introducing a procurement software which has been interfaced with the budget and makes it impossible for entities to receive budgetary allocations if they do not have procurement plans.

Offences
Article 92 (1) of the procurement law states: “Any person who contravenes any provision of this Act commits an offence and where no penalty has been provided for the offence, the person is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding 1,000 penalty units or a term of imprisonment not exceeding five years or to both.”

According to Dr Mensah, if the law is anything to go by, all heads of procurement entities who failed to submit their plans and who failed to go according to the plan they submitted have all fallen foul of the law and must face the sanctions prescribed by the law as recently applied to the officers of the Electoral Commission.

But Mrs Rhoda Appiah said that the Public Procurement Authority has no power to prosecute.

“We write letters to them. It is an offence but we don’t prosecute and if they are going to find anything punitive it is when their monies are not released,” she said.

In September, however, the Authority has hauled some eight procurement entities to the Economic and Organised Crime Office. It is not clear however what sections of the procurement law were breached.