Treasury to tighten tender exemptions
• Too many entities secure deviations, says Mogajane
The Treasury’s director-general, Dondo Mogajane, has complained to the standing committee on public accounts about accounting officers becoming more dismissive of measures they must fulfil in order to bypass procurement guidelines.
However, the days of using deviation applications to avoid competitive tenders were numbered as Treasury was working on measures to make it harder to get deviation approval.
Treasury has mechanisms in place that allow entities and departments to procure goods outside of the Public Finance Management Act and state procurement guidelines.
These provisions are designed to enable emergency procurement or to expedite the process, in which case only one supplier is used and there is no competitive bidding.
However, an increasing number of entities and departments were invoking emergency procurement conditions unnecessarily in order to avoid a bidding process, compromising the integrity of the system while leaving the state vulnerable to needless waste.
Mogajane told the committee on Wednesday that procure- ment through deviation was accepted by law.
He was in Parliament with a delegation from the office of the chief procurement officer to provide details on deviation and expansion applications.
“When departments formally request this, they are not breaking the law, they are exercising their rights,” he said.
However, “there [was] a spike in March, when departments [left] … procurement to the last minute and rush[ed] to catch up in time for the beginning of the new financial year”, said Mogajane.
Treasury was working on measures to make it harder for departments and entities to secure approval for deviations or expansions.
“We introduced a requirement from national and provincial government departments to introduce detailed procurement plans. If a deviation is requested, we don’t approve right away. We check against the procure- ment plan and reject what does not fall in line with that,” said the director-general.
Treasury chief director for governance, compliance and monitoring Solly Tshitangano said Eskom had submitted deviation applications for Medupi and Kusile.
These had shown the two megaprojects, years behind schedule and have incurred billions of rand in overruns, had been undermined by poor planning by Eskom.
“We got an application from Eskom and letter of response … so the committee can see where we stand. We called Eskom to a meeting to ask why this was happening. They will tell you the designs that were there are not talking to implementation, so they asked for a deviation.”
Themba Godi, chairman of the committee, said the information provided by Treasury was a critical part of ensuring accountability when guidelines were maliciously disregarded.
Acting chief procurement officer Willie Mathebula said: “We do know that certain institutions … have a high number of requests for deviations. I also appreciate the calls for quarterly engagements to nip this in the bud before it becomes a norm in the procurement process.”
TREASURY WAS WORKING ON MEASURES TO MAKE IT HARDER TO SECURE DEVIATIONS