Compendium of Country Examples and Lessons Learned from ...

Country experiencesMany pilot countries have frankly expressed their concern that the process of data collection has beencomplicated and expensive and that poor record keeping and incomplete files are major hindrances tocollecting data. In many cases, time allocated to undertake the assessment proved insufficient becausekey documents were missing or kept at other government departments.Zambia has identified record management as a major weakness of its system. Record keeping isreportedly very poor and there are no norms for the safe keeping of records and documents related totransactions and contract management. As a result, accessing information was a great challenge asthere was no particular system in which procurement information was kept. In most ministries, onlylimited information was available at the Procurement and Supplies Unit as most of the informationwas passed on to the accounts department. The assessors therefore had to go through variousdepartments in order to trace the process of a particular procurement. As many as 55.7% of the tendershad incomplete documentation. As a result of the poor record keeping, the time that was allocated toundertake the assessment at each institution proved insufficient. This imposed limitations on extensivecollection and follow up on data. Zambia is implementing a major Public Expenditure Managementand Fiscal Accountability (PEMFA) programme. The results of the procurement assessment willenable procurement-related issues to feed into this programme.Lao similarly has stated that administrative systems on recording and documentation of procurementand contract transactions at the contracting entity level are absent. In Sierra Leone, an analysis ofperformance of public procurement contracts has not been made under the assessment because of theconstraints associated with record keeping, at times non availability of records in the entities. Tanzaniahas noted that in most cases procurement documents are available but scattered in different files,taking a lot of time to locate for verification. In Uganda, it is specified that records are to be kept bythe procuring entities for at least seven years, however there are no clearly-established securityprotocols to protect records, either physical or electronic.Mongolia notes in their assessment report that in some cases, where the assessors conducted a reviewof procurement files in collaboration with procurement officers, some important documents which arekey sources for gathering data under the relevant CPIs were missing or kept separately at anotherdepartment thus making the CPI tables incomplete. These documents include bid evaluation reports,final signed contracts, contract administration evidences, completion reports or payment-relateddocuments. Mongolia summarises that the lack of complete CPI information means that there is noway of demonstrating performance since the problem is one of incomplete information and notnecessarily of performance.Niger chose 15 procurement cases to conduct a compliance test. The existence of properdocumentation was defined as “entry point”, and the completeness of the existing files was classifiedin 3 categories (good, acceptable, poor). As a result, 40% of the selected procurement cases wereconsidered auditable, 27% were auditable with reservations and 33% were not considered auditable.Often misconstrued as a pure administrative burden, poor record keeping in fact causes a multitude ofnegative impacts as Figure 4 illustrates:34 COMPENDIUM OF COUNTRY EXAMPLES AND LESSONS LEARNED […] - OECD 2008