VOA’s investigation into Albania’s health: Lack of transparency in procurement and tenders for the Covid-19 Pandemic

The study notes that more than half of health procurements had only one operator in competition.

“In health tenders, competition is very limited. Over 55 percent of the tenders conducted from 2016 to December 2021 had only one operator participating in the competition, while 35 percent had more than two operators in the competition “- the report detailed.

For the same period, the report adds, only 47 percent of tenders conducted had contracts entered into and about 16 percent of procedures were canceled.

The study notes that open competition was used in only 31 percent of advertisements and that there are a number of complaints about them to contracting authorities, which, according to the survey, drafted exclusionary technical criteria, indirectly favoring companies affiliated with the authority. contractor.

The rest, 17 percent of tenders were done according to the negotiated procedure, while 32 percent of them were done according to the proposal procedure.

“From the beginning of the pandemic until the beginning of December 2021, the health authorities conducted 198 procurement procedures on overcoming Covid-19 worth over 35 million euros. Nearly half of them, 90 tenders were made with only one competitive operator, who benefited from almost the entire limit fund “- the report states.

For the same period, from March 2020 to May 2021, health institutions contracted 60 companies for material supplies related to the pandemic, the study notes, of which 11 companies, or 18 percent of the total contracts, were secret. Also 11 third contracts, or 18 percent of the winning operators had only the unit price value and not the total amount.

The study notes that of the 59 companies that were contracted, only 39 of them received payments within the pandemic year.

“Albania is one of the few countries in Europe and the Balkans that has not published data and reports on the effectiveness of the use of funds,” said the report of the organization Together for Life.

According to the study, the management of health funds has significant lack of transparency and accountability.

The authors singled out the direct procurement of March two years ago for the purchase of 54 respirators for 1.1 million euros, of which a company that won the secret contract brought only 5 respirators.

“Due to the lack of consistency of project codes for coping with COVID-19 and numerous revisions after normative acts with some government decisions, tracking until the final realization of COVID-19 funds was difficult, almost impossible,” said the organization. .
The monitoring showed that all additional funding for the Ministry of Health and Social Protection, allocated by government decisions during 2020, were not reflected in the respective tables of Normative Acts, so the funds allocated for the pandemic went to expenditures. others unrelated to the pandemic.

The lack of transparency in the use of funds for pandemic management was so great that it was considered a concern by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which does not have tender monitoring at the core of its work. The IMF informed that the emergency procurements for dealing with the pandemic were not transparent and asked the Supreme State Audit to intensify the controls and publish them “- it is stated in the report./VOA

top channel