The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Government's top procurement official yesterday predicted that it will be "on target" to disclose all contract awards within 60 days - as required by law - come March 2024.

Carl Oliver, the acting chief procurement officer and Ministry of Finance's deputy director of economic planning, told Tribune Business that the Government plans to disclose all contract awarded via the Go Bonfire online portal for October and November 2023 by February.

Given that the current Public Procurement Act requires that details on government contract awards be published within 60 days of issuance, he explained that hitting this publication deadline will bring the Davis administration into compliance with the law's demands.

"We're not far away," Mr Oliver told this newspaper of the 60-day disclosure requirement. "The information that was just published was from September 1, 2022, to September 30, 2023. The next submission will be for October and November. The deadline for November is the end of January.

"In February we will be providing information for October 2023 and November 2023. After that, we will be on target. We're moving in the right direction, and myself, the financial secretary [Simon Wilson] and the minister [Michael Halkitis] are quite pleased with the results we are getting. We are on schedule for March."

The original Public Procurement Act, which came into effect on September 1, 2021, but has now been repealed and replaced, required from that moment on that all government contracts be disclosed within 60 days of their issuance. The Government was supposed to disclose the name and address of winning bidders, the procuring entity, the procurement selection method and the value of the contract.

The revised Public Procurement Act took effect on July 1 this year. The Government's initial release of contracts awarded via the Go Bonfire portal provides the value of the awards, identifies the procuring entity and procurement vendor, plus the winning bidder, but provided no address for the latter or any further details.

That first release, which came in mid-October 2023, covered the nine months to end-June that year and detailed 843 contracts worth a total $140m. Yesterday's release, which covers up to end-September last year, effectively covers the three-month period that comprises the third quarter.

Based on the information provided, it showed a further $18.5m in contracts were awarded over the three months to end-September 2023. This took the total value of contracts awarded for the 13 months since September 1, 2022, to $158.477m, but not all agencies, ministries and departments were included in the list or that figure.

Mr Oliver yesterday confirmed that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) and Water & Sewerage Corporation, which are major contract issuers, "haven't been given the green light yet" to use the Go Bonfire platform because training of the relevant executives is ongoing and they are still getting to understand which procurement method to use.

He estimated that the SOEs should be ready to start using the procurement portal by "late February" or early March, again acknowledging the challenges in changing the culture and "status quo" where successive administrations have disclosed minimal details on public contact awards.

The Government has frequently come under attack from Michael Pintard, leader of the Opposition, and other members of the Free National Movement (FNM) who have accused it of deliberately failing to comply with the Public Procurement Act and especially its provisions demanding greater disclosures, openness and transparency around the awarding of government contracts.

But Michael Halkitis, minister of economic affairs, late last year asserted there was “never any sort of desire or intention to circumvent” the Public Procurement Act’s requirements as he blamed any non-compliance on the need to put in place supporting infrastructure.

He added that the Davis administration has had to ensure public officials are fully trained and equipped to implement the Act’s legally-mandated requirements. It has also had to appoint a chief procurement officer, and implement the necessary software.

“In order to really effect it, there was a large infrastructure that had to be put in place at the back end of it,” Mr Halkitis said of the Act. “For example, the appointment of a chief procurement officer, the training of procurement committees in not only the Ministry of Finance, but in every single ministry and government agency. We’re talking about IT, acquiring the IT and getting people trained up on it, and so that is what we have been doing for the last, you know, 18 months.

“We are at a position right now where we have just about completed the training. And there are some of the contracts that have to be uploaded. We think we are almost at a position where those are completed. So, you know, we will begin to do that. We can look for that in the coming weeks.”

Mr Halkitis added: “But I would just like to say this now. [There] never was any sort of desire or intention to circumvent but, you know, it’s very, very easy to go into Parliament and pass a law and say we’re doing this and doing that. You know, we see a number of pieces of legislation where we have to go back now.

“At the back end of it, there are a lot of requirements that we had to do. So the public will see that very shortly. We’re committed to doing it, those few agencies that have not fully uploaded. We have people working on that now to get that done as soon as possible. So you’ll see that shortly…definitely before the end of the year.”