Public procurement of IT solutions must be monitored for violations, the Polish Free and Open Source Software Foundation (FWiOO) concludes in its final report on its public IT procurement project PPPIT, published this summer. After having studied hundreds of procurement procedures by Polish public administrations, the organisation infers that requests and specifications can be formulated seemingly without breaking the rules.
In their final report, covering the one hundred largest tenders that were published in the second half of 2012, the groups lists the most common mistakes it found in public procurement procedures, mostly naming specific products and brands. PPPIT noticed cases of public administrations locked-in by IT vendors and some procedures lacked any kind of cost analysis. Others specified hardware configurations tailored to fit a single vendor. Such errors obstruct fair competition, PPPIT writes.
The past four years, PPPIT regularly intervened in procurement requests, asking public administration to correct their requests and avoid using discriminatory specifications. "In total, since 2009 we've looked in detail at over 400 procurement procedures. Some 70 per cent of those procedures contained errors or were badly prepared", says Rafał Brzychcy, PPPIT project manager.
The group managed to contact public administrations in just a quarter of all investigated cases. "In the first year, we never got a reply to our letters. However, in 2013, the public administration corrected their request in half of the cases."
Corruption
FWiOO's president Michał Woźniak: "Watchdog organisations like PPPIT are not a party in procurement procedures. So we can neither protest nor stop any procedure that we think problematic. Administrations can ignore our interventions." He consider it a success that the group received plenty of replies and that some of the specifications were changed following PPPITs intervention.
IT procurement procedures are susceptible to fraud, Brzychcy points out. Since 2011, Poland's Central Anti-corruption Bureau has arrested more than 37 people suspected of fraud related to IT procurement, involving sales representatives that worked for large international IT vendors. This week Sunday the bureau arrested the deputy head of the country's statistics office and a Foreign Ministry official in charge of IT systems procurement. The agency's spokesman Jacek Dobrzynsk called it "the biggest scandal in the history of Poland."
Fundamental
PPPIT, a project by the Polish Foundation for Free and Open Software (FWIOO), ran from late 2009 to the summer of 2013. PPPIT was supported by the European Enlargement and Norway Grants and by investor George Soros through his Fundacja Batorego (Stefan Batory Foundation), a funding organisation aiming to improve the country's civil society. Two of Poland's ministries, that for Internal Affairs and that of Administration and Digitisation were honorary patrons for the project.
"We're looking for funds to continue PPPIT", says Woźniak. "But getting funding for this sort of work is not easy."
More information:
Final PPPIT report (pdf, in Polish)
PPPIT monitored procurement cases (in Polish)
Wyborcza Biz news item (in Polish)
The News news item
Associated Press news item