ArmInfo. New mechanisms of control over the public procurement process will be created in Armenia. The National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia at the session on January 20 in the first reading introduced amendments and additions to the Law "On State Purchases".
According to Gevork Papoyan, a co-author of the submitted document, MP from the ruling My Step faction Gevork Papoyan, the amendments provide for mechanisms that reduce corruption risks to zero, increase the transparency of the public procurement process, which, as a result, will lead to an increase in the level of public confidence in these processes. The authors of the bill propose to ensure the participation of representatives of the defeated companies in the tender of companies in the procedure for accepting state purchases. Along with this, interested public organizations and the media will also take part in the procedure. All of them will be able to check the conformity of the goods supplied under public procurement with the parameters described in the application. Such mechanisms will operate under contracts worth over 1 million drams. "In other words, new mechanisms of public control over the public procurement process are being created," the deputy concluded. It should be noted, however, that lately in Armenia more and more government purchases are carried out on behalf of one person, which causes fair criticism from the expert community.
Earlier, NA Deputy Sergei Bagratyan repeatedly raised the issue of the need to change the vicious practice of applying the public procurement system on behalf of one person. According to him, at present, tenders, as a rule, involve interconnected persons. The representative of the state agrees in advance with the business entity on the subject of goods and services, after which he submits the question to the competition according to the already "agreed" nomenclature. As a result of the application of this vicious practice, more and more often there are subjects dominating the market. Let us also remind that earlier the RA Minister of Finance Atom Janjughazyan reported on innovations, one of which would be the transfer of the procurement issue from the state representative to the country's banking system.