Recently, the draft of Procurement Law (amended) is given to the Vietnam National Assembly at the 5th session of the XIII National Assembly. It has received much positive feedback, especially from the business world. Procurement is an important bidding stage to attract investment capital into the Vietnamese economy. But how to help Vietnamese contractors not lose in their home market, as well as avoid “contract collusion” detrimental to investors is still long story without an end.
Vietnamese contractors lost in their home market.
According to Mr Bui Quang Vinh, Minister of Planning and Investment, procurement is always an important task in the investment plan. In the stage where the country is implementing economic opening policy as the current, to attract investment resources, the state has many incentives for local and foreign contractors. Accordingly, incentives are applied to local contractors participating in international tenders and contractors providing goods with domestic production costs accounted for 30 percent or more, but the proportion of winning foreign contractors is still high. According to the analysis of many experts, this situation in procurement management in Vietnam is mainly attributable to: limited capital resources, forced to borrow money from foreign investors. When using foreign capital, Vietnam has to choose foreign contractors from country lender as a condition for their loans; low approved estimate probably due to lack of funds, or they have to build construction projects with low estimate loan to easily get approval. Due to low estimate, investor is forced to choose contractors with low bid (some foreign contractors bid very low). In addition, methods of assessment of bids and contractor selection method have not diversified; contract management phase of the investor is not good).
Therefore, according to Mr Vinh, the revised draft Procurement Law has added more detail and specific provisions on incentives for contractors not only for goods in directions such as: require foreign contractors participating in international bidding in Vietnam to sign with partner or sign a contract with Vietnamese subcontractor (the current Procurement Law does not have this regulation); foreign contractors are only allowed to use foreign workers when domestic workers are incapable and do not meet the performance requirements of packages prescribed by law; for the international bid tender, the contractor and domestic goods enjoy preferential in the following cases: (a) domestic contractors attend international tender bid in consulting services, non-consulting services, construction, composite, (b) the contractor in partnership with members who are domestic contractors undertaking work valued at more than 50 percent for consulting services package, non-consulting services, construction, composite, and (c) the contractor provides goods among which the cost of domestic production accounts for 30 percent or more; contractors are small businesses or contractors with over 50 percent of workers who are wounded or disabled persons shall be given priority in the contractor selection process; contractor’s reputations in the previous process (quality, schedule) are added to the criteria evaluation; adding assessment methods on bids files which combine technique and price for procurement of goods, information technology, telecommunications, under which bids have higher specification will prevail.
Avoiding “contract collusion”
“Contract Collusion” is also emerging as one of the harder content to manage in procurement. It can be understood that the situation of “contract collusion” stems from that contractors collude in borrowing or renting documents to bid, to restrain price detrimental to investors. The winning bid will then have to deduct a commission for the one who lend them bidding documents. Therefore, in the Draft Law on Procurement, to prevent this situation, the policy makers drafted Article 32 to regulate acts prohibited in the contractor selection process. In item 3, prohibit collusion between the parties in the bidding to affect the interests of the collective and the interests of the nation. However, many experts still wonder that the mandatory provisions issued by the State still have many gaps and low feasibility. Specifically, the normal bidding process in our country mainly consists of two tender representatives (the owner and contractor). This is different from international rules where regulate that bidding is assigned to the trading floor and company specialized in bidding. The bottlenecks in the Law of Procurement of our country led to a number of implications such as bid collusion, trying to lobby for winning.
Also, online bidding is also one of the transparent solutions, creating “clean” auction. And if we apply popular online bidding, it will also create a fair competition among bidders, reducing travel time, reducing administrative procedures for the contractor, contributing to reduce corruption, waste and collusion. However, if Vietnam wants to do well, they need to improve information security, quality of infrastructure of information technology. Because in addition to the package in terms of pure socio-economic interests, there are specialized packages (drugs, minerals) and package of national secrets, packages of urgent projects for national interests.
Anh Phuong
Đăng ký: VietNam News
