<p>Today (June 1), the Center for Civil Communications published the   results from the regular public procurements monitoring in the country   and the results from the survey of companies about their experience with   the public procurement procedures.</p>
<p>Presenting the <a href="https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0Bzn2sNO0yoKGYmNmN2Q4OWItZTE5NC00ZWYwLWE1YTItMWIyZDI4OGYwNmMz&amp;hl=en&amp;authkey=CKzt9uMB" target="_blank">Quarterly report with the results from the public procurements monitoring in the Republic of Macedonia</a>(.pdf)    for the period from January to March 2010, Mrs. Vanja Mihajlova and    Nikola Tupancheski PhD stressed that there is still space for    improvement of the public procurement process in the country especially    in terms of more consistent abiding by the legislation by the state    institutions, and they also emphasized the need to further stipulate the    legal provisions to reduce the space for possible abuses in practice.<br /> <br /> The monitoring of the public procurements at a central and local level resulted with the following findings key findings:</p>
<ul>
<li>Increased use of scoring criteria for the bids which doesn’t guarantee the selection of the most favourable bid;</li>
<li>Inadequate criteria are selected for determining the ability of companies to participate in public procurement procedures;</li>
<li>High percentage of annulled public procurement procedures (20% of the monitored procedures);</li>
<li>e-auction is only used in 5.5% of the public procurement procedures,   which is several times less than the legal threshold of 30%;</li>
<li>Rapidly increasing number of framework agreements concluded without specifying the ways in which contracts are awarded to firms;</li>
<li>The legal obligation to inform the companies in detail about the   reasons for selection of the most favourable bid or rejection of a   certain bidder is not adhered to;</li>
<li>The requests for submitting a bank guarantee for the bid as well as the amount of the guarantee are reduced,</li>
<li>The fee for obtaining the tender documentation is being slightly reduced.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: center;">{vimeo}12200045{/vimeo}</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">In the survey   conducted for representatives of the public procurement  departments  of  138 companies, members of the Economic Chamber of  Macedonia and the   Union of Chambers of Commerce, the main problems that  companies said   they were facing in public procurement procedures were:  vague tender   documentation and technical specification, improper scoring  of the bids   and favouring a certain bid; use of inadequate criteria to  award the   contract, and late payment for the assets and services  supplied. The   score of the companies in the country in the overall  public procurement   process has dropped. The average score in this survey  is now 2.80 as   opposed to last year's score of 2.93 (on a scale of 1 to  5).</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">http://www.flickr.com/photos/cccenter/sets/72157624056128271/</p>