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Officials admit it’s difficult to expand e-bidding
1:57 PM,6/1/2012
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Pilot program succeeds…
Director of the Bidding Management Department under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, Le Van Tang has affirmed that e-bidding can bring many benefits. With e-bidding, the bids can be carried out in an open and transparent way. Especially, e-bidding can help enterprises save expenses.
Computers can show results just within one minute, while the contractors in Ca Mau province can sit at their offices and join the bids in Hanoi, while they do not have to spend time and money to fly to the capital city.
To date, the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) has successfully carried out e-bids at three enterprises; namely the Electricity of Vietnam (EVN), the Vietnam Post and Communications Group (VNPT) and Hanoi City. More than 10 package deals have been successfully made via Internet.
However, MPI, though declaring the success with the pilot program, has admitted that it would be very difficult to organize e-bids on a large scale.
“In order to join e-bids, contractors need to have qualified information technology (IT) officers, while it is necessary to have Internet connected to remote areas,” Tang said.
Meanwhile, in reality, many Vietnamese contractors do not have high English and IT skills. Especially, the majority of small contractors only have construction engineers and goods trading officers, while they do not have IT engineers. As a result, they cannot purchase, keep and treat the bidding documents when joining e-bids.
…but big difficulties persist
In fact, Vietnam has been making every effort to speed up the building of e-bidding system, especially when it has more deeply integrated into the world by joining organizations, international trade agreements, such as the World Trade Organization WTO and the Trans-Pacific Partnership TPP.
“As Vietnam has joined WTO, it cannot stand outside the Government Procurement Agreement GPA for ever,” Tang said.
The 2010’s amended version of GPA has clear provisions about e-bidding. When conducting procurement activities under the scope of the agreement via electronic means, investors must be sure that the procurement is carried out via the IT system and software which include the technologies and software products relating to the information authentication and encryption, regularly existing and compatible to other information systems and software; to take the measures to ensure the implement measures to ensure the integrity of the request to participate in bidding and of bidding documents tenders, including the programming time of receipt of bidding documents and prevent inappropriate accesses.
It is estimated that when accepting the documents for joining bids from contractors, investors can shorten the time needed for 10 days.
However, according to Tang, the government procurement in bidding activities proves to be the weak point of Vietnam. Vietnamese contractors even fail to obtain the contracts on supplying goods to projects right on the home market. Therefore, they do not have many opportunities to win the bids in the US or other countries.
Especially, experts have warned that with the e-bidding, the possibility of winning bids of domestic contractors would decrease due to the limited capability in comparison with international contractors.
Tang said that MPI plans to carry out e-bidding step by step. At first, e-bidding would be carried out in big cities and then expanded to other localities.
At present, contractors who join bids via the Internet, can enjoy fee exemption. However, MPI is considering collecting low fees in order to raise funds to build and run the systems.
“The State will continue making investments to develop the modern system,” Tang said.
Source: Vietnamnet |
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