PPADB Bemoans Poor Record Keeping In Districts
Pauline Dikuelo | Monday February 22, 2021 16:14
However, when commenting in PPADB’s 2019-2020 annual report, Executive Chairperson, Elijah Motshedi said they continued to engage relevant parties to address the problem.
“The main challenge in relation to significant devolution of Authority to Committees of the Board is inadequate resources for the procurement function on some Procurement Entities (PEs) to support the work of the Committees and facilitate procurement and project implementation at Ministries,” he said.
There are 30 DATCs across the country that exercise the powers delegated to them by the Board. The financial threshold for the period under review ranged from P2 million to P20 million.
On the other hand, Motshedi said while significant progress has been made with online procurement, lack of capacity, facilities, resources and low system uptake by PEs continued to undermine the efforts made thus far.
However, PPADB was continuing to carry out capacity building, handholding and readiness assessments of the Ministries to increase uptake and use of online tendering. This will ultimately improve efficiency of the procurement system in government.
Equally, complaint resolution remained a challenge primarily due to delays in sourcing tender documents from PEs. In order to address the challenge, the PPADB continued to audit entities to ensure compliance to records management procedures.
The Board has also proposed inclusion of some provisions on the proposed review of the PPAD Act to improve the process of complaints review as it significantly contributed to delays in project implementation and service delivery. Failure to submit End of Activity Reports (EOAR) by PEs has hampered the performance monitoring of those contracted in the implementation of government projects as well as effectiveness of the suspension and delisting committee.
The Committee is challenged to discipline non- performance or unethical business conduct by contractors as EOARs are hardly submitted for appropriate action.
PPADB continued to pursue entities to adhere to the PPAD Act.
In addition, the Board during this financial year started assessment of parastatals to ensure compliance with PPAD Act.
Five parastatals were audited out of the planned six. PPADB could not audit more parastatals as desired due to capacity constraints. However, the Board plans to increase monitoring of parastatals procurement in the next financial year.
The Board will review its capacity to ensure it is adequately resourced to execute its mandate.