Improving and adopting Serbia's Public Procurement Law

The organisation Transparency-Serbia considers that the government and the National Assembly should invest additional efforts to consider and adopt the Public Procurement Law as soon as possible, in order to start implementing new solutions which secure greater public availability of procedures, savings and better protect the public interest. Having in mind that public procurement spendings amount to twelve per cent of the Gross Domestic Product, each day of delaying the implementation of new solutions means the loss of millions of tax payers' dinars, which could be used for other, necessary purposes.

In order to strengthen the effects of the new law to fight against corruption, Transparency-Serbia prepared and delivered to the parliamentary groups and to the Ministry of Finance a series of amendments to add them to the Government's preposition. By accepting these amendments the possible independence of the procurement entity would be decreased by determining the level of confidentiality of procurement processes; by excluding the implementation of the law when using assets originating from credits; by refusing offers because of badly performed previous contracts on public procurements; by determining criteria to evaluate the bids; and by limiting changing contractual obligations during the realisation of the procurement process.

By accepting Transparency-Serbia's prepositions anti-corruption rules would widen, the number of information available over the Public Procurement portal would increase, the Commission for Protection of Rights would get firmer guarantees to collect the necessary data for their decision-making process, and the implementation of the law would start 45 days earlier than anticipated in the government’s preposition of the law.