Kosovo Democratic Institute (KDI) through a roundtable today, revealed the policy brief called ‘’Integrity, crucial element for improvements in public procurement’’ which depicts the current policies on public money management through public procurement, problems which this process faces, and the overall need to increase integrity in this sector.

The basis of this analysis emanates from the joint workshop with government representatives, judiciary representatives, civil society and media representatives, and also from the good international practices which have produced results on increasing the institutional integrity.

On this occasion, Arben Kelmendi, manager of Anti-Corruption program in KDI, said that during 2017 in Kosovo were developed 10,214 procurement activities from 164 Contracting Authorities. The amount of these procurements, including the allocated part for 2017, for building the motorway ‘’Arbën Xhaferi’’ is 641,298,561.48 euro or 35% of the allocated budget for the same year (1,810,131,478.00 Euro).

‘’This percentage shows that Public Procurement constitutes on one of the main activities in public money expenditures. Additionally, he said that public procurement in Kosovo continues to be vulnerable to corruption regardless the progress achieved during the last years on addressing this phenomena. According to different international reports, the legislation has gone through many amendments and currently is aligned with EU acquis communautaire’’ he noted

Harmoniously Arton Demhasaj, executive director of ÇOHU organization, emphasized the inevitability for specialization of the prosecutors and judges for public procurement cases is evident. He also added that there is a need for increasing the human resources respectively experts on the field of public procurement as assisting staff for judiciary.

‘’The implementation of the criminal code disposition that deals with violations in the field of public procurement would improve the field of procurement in a transparent way, so there’s less violations in this field’’ he noted.

Whereas Diana Metushi-Krasniqi from KDI said that even though Kosovo functions on many levels of accountability when it comes to managing public finance, different international reports and those from civil society and media in Kosovo find that tenders are still prearranged to close friends and family members of politicians, there is still noncompliance with the legislation by the contracting authorities, limited transparency, bid manipulation, poor contract management, fixed prices after signing the contract, political pressure, state capture, problems with the electronic platform for public procurement and continuous impunity for the major part of these violations and irregularities.

Since this problems are closely related with human factor, she affirmed that is essential to strengthen integrity and accountability in this important sector of taxpayer’s money expenditures.

‘’Integrity, a crucial element for improvements in Public Procurement’’ concludes that focus on improving integrity in public procurement is essential to surface this situation. KDI recommends proceeding with the establishment of Integrity Byro inside Public Procurement Regulatory Commission. The Integrity Byro would function as a national center of expertise and would be supporting the Contracting Authorities in implementation and surveillance of their responsibilities in the field of integrity and promoting it as the fundamental value of good governance.

This project is funded by Kosovo Foundation for Open Society – KFOS.

The policy brief can be found here.