Public centralized procurement database to combat corruption

In yesterday’s meeting at the Legislative Assembly (AL), several lawmakers urged the government to accelerate the planning of a centralized database — a platform offering public access to all details of government procurement processes such as tender requirements and bidders — to combat corruption.
Following a heated discussion at AL during which lawmakers like José Maria Pereira Coutinho, Sulu Sou, Au Kam San, denounced the long-standing pitfalls in the current procurement mechanism, the proposed amendments to Law No. 122/84/M — “Regulations of Government Procurement” were finally passed yesterday at the AL.
The controversial Law No. 122/84/M came into force in 1985. It was amended only once, in 1989, with an increase in the threshold of the procurement amount. The government had not made any modifications to the regime in the past 32 years.
Considering that the regime fails to meet present-day requirements, on January 13, 2021 the SAR government submitted to the AL a series of draft amendments to the regime. The proposed changes were later passed by the AL on February 2, with 25 votes in favor, four against, and 2 abstentions.
At the initial stage, the government focuses on modifying the threshold amount in each procurement — which is to increase the sums across all tender categories to six times the original amounts.
However, “those amendments are [inadequate to help promote] the transparency of the procurement mechanism. They still fail to meet public requests to launch a centralized platform offering open data of tenders,” Coutinho said.
Such an integrated platform incorporating all the procurement processes across government departments will be conducive to creating more open, fair and transparent conditions for competition between prospective bidders, Coutinho urged.
He emphasized that favoritism and injustice in procurements have always been seen, for example in the way that preconditions can be seemingly tailor-made for one particular company to be awarded the tender.
A consolidated platform for the public to have easy access to the procurement data has long been common practice in many developed countries and regions. It is a solution to corruption in procurement regimes, he explained.
Sulu Sou echoes Coutinho’s remarks, stressing that merely increasing the threshold amount for each procurement cannot help facilitate a more equitable mechanism.
“Given the fact that Macau has experienced a paradigm shift in its economic and societal development over the past decades, this underscores that the Law was very outmoded — which has been easily come to be a hotbed of corruption,” Sou remarked.
The idea of establishing a public centralized procurement database was first floated in the Policy Address in 2018. Nonetheless, “the proposition has still under its planning stage,” Sou said.
In response, Secretary for Economy and Finance Lei Wai Nong promised that the government would work to submit a proposal for an overarching reform to the procurement mechanism to the AL in 2022, which will help usher in a new and improved regime.
“Shortly after this amended [bill] comes into force, we will draft a regulatory document to stipulate systemized guidelines of the release of procurement data for all government departments to follow. In addition, we’re planning to establish a public and centralized platform for the relevant information.”