EXPERTS at an international conference in the city recently laid emphasis on ensuring the value of tax-payers’ money from home and abroad in public procurement for development projects by preventing corruption and wasteful expenditure buying the best goods at lower cost. They called for ensuring transparency and accountability in public procurement to ensure the best use of resources to accelerate growth in Bangladesh economy now entering into a middle-income country status. What made the case more important for Bangladesh is that scarcity of resources is getting more pronounced here now as big development projects in infrastructure sector are being mooted out. So wasteful expenditure of fund must be avoided to make more resources available for development projects. In fact this is what everybody says but nobody in the government is seriously working to reduce the waste. Rather national and international lobbies care at work to use government procurement to mint more money illegally. It is the biggest way to making illegal wealth. In experts’ opinion around 0.5 percent growth in the economy can be ensured alone by avoiding a 10 percent wasteful expenditure.
Public procurement is most vulnerable to corruption. So the quality of governance is a major factor to ensure integrity in Bangladesh’s public procurement activities. It not only acts as a major interface between the public and the private sectors, public procurement provides multiple opportunities for public and private sector actors to divert public funds for private gain by wasting precious funds using fictitious deals or procurement documents. Being a major economic activity of the government where corruption has a potential high impact, we believe that public procurement needs to be thoroughly regulated using competitive bidding and monitoring deals and supply pipelines.
In order to ensure overall value for development fund, the challenge for our decision makers is to limit waste of resources and reduce risks to major waste. Here not only honesty is important but also fear of follow up and punishment to persons and firms to be found resorting to corruption and misuse of resources may be the most crucial factor to check the waste. In all parts of the world, transparency and accountability are recognized as key conditions for promoting integrity and preventing corruption in public procurement. Our government needs to take it seriously. Transparency and accountability must coexist in a balanced manner with other good governance imperatives, such as efficient management of public resources and auditing. Government bodies must enforce good business practices using government officials, representatives from civil society and the private sector.
In fact procurement related transactions provide a fertile ground for corruption in the public sector and it must be closely monitored. Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) found that mismanagement of development projects is one of the major reasons behind Bangladesh’s worst position in the global Corruption Perception Index. We must work towards making strict assessments of public procurement systems along with enforcing procurement reforms to streamline and regulate the procurement process to limit the waste of resources.
