The conference was organized as part of the Twinning project: "Strengthening Public Procurement in Serbia" with the aim of offering solutions for tackling the most common corruption issues public procurement procedures, such as:

• How to deal with rigging of tenders by adjustment of specifications in tender documentation to benefit a specific bidder?
• How to tackle agreement of bidders, a frequent issue when there are a few bidders?
• How to protect the state as a buyer from unethical bidders that do not carry out their contracted obligations (use of negative references and "Blacklisting").
• How to deal with bidders that offer the same goods in the same city to contracting authorities at very different prices?

Program

Press release

Introductory statements

Presentation

(Igor Šoltes, Supreme Audit Institution, Slovenia; Tomaž Vesel, Supreme Audit Institution, Slovenia; Saša Varinac, Public Procurement Office, Serbia) (here)

Media

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Danas

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Glas Srbije

Photo gallery 

The sophistication level of the Public Procurement Portal, pursuant to the Capgemini Methodology, which is used for the purposes of the European Commission, is mark 3 out of top mark 4, meaning that this service's performance is rated at 75%. Source:  The National Information Technology and Internet Agency, "E-Government Development in the Republic of Serbia for 2009", link

According to a European Commission's recommendation, e-Governments in the EU Member States have been evaluated until 2009 pursuant to a methodology nicknamed eGovBe Methodology that comprises these four indicators: sophistication, service availability, user-centricity, and national portal. Source: Capgemini, "The User Challenge Benchmarking the Supply of Online Public Services", link

The e-Government Study of 2009, compiled for the European Commission by Capgemini, introduced the additional three indicators: user experience, e-public procurement service availability, and e-public procurement service implementation. Source:  Capgemini, "Smarter, Faster, Better eGovernment", link

According to the official evaluation of the National Information Technology and Internet Agency which applied eGovBe Methodology without including the new indicators, the e-Government in Serbia in 2009 has considerably improved relative to the first measurements conducted in 2004. From the level of 15.24%, as was evaluated our sophistication in 2004, we have reached a level of 51% sophistication in 2009. Source: Gusev, M., Armenski, G. "Gap Analysis of eGovernment in Western Balkans", link

The experts of the Faculty of Electronics in Niš prepared a scientific project dedicated to e-Government development in Serbia, and presented it in the U IS DOS Conference held in the Sava Centre in October 2010. This work pointed out that the stated level of 51% sophistication of e-Government in Serbia would have been considerably higher if the evaluation had applied the new Capgemini methodology that included e-public procurement service availability and implementation. Source: L. Stoimenov, N. Veljković, S. Bogdanović-Dinić, "e-Government Development in Serbia - Trends and Challenges as Outcomes of Application of New Technologies" ("Razvoj E-uprave u Srbiji-trendovi i izazovi kao posledica primene novih tehnologija")

They hold that such upgrading would be due, first and foremost, to the Public Procurement Office's facilitating, via its Public Procurement Portal, the publishing, monitoring and searching of public procurements, as well as its presenting an overview of, and the possibility to download tender documents, thus placing Serbia on a level playing field with the EU countries in the domain of the public procurement.

Agenda

About the Project

Media reports

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Media centar

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SRB-RSS

Foto Gallery

In the first part of the Conference, key challenges of public procurement systems in SEE countries were discussed, such were: 1) training/certification of public procurement officials, 2) collaborative/centralized procurement and 3) national strategy for development of public procurement system. Participants came from: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia.

In the second part of the Conference, concessions and PPP concepts and experiences of Slovenia and Croatia were presented and discussed.

Agenda

Photo gallery

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Progress is measured on the basis of decisions taken, legislation adopted and measures implemented. As a rule, legislation or measures which are under preparation or are awaiting parliamentary approval have not been taken into account. This approach ensures equal treatment across all reports and permits an objective assessment.

EC progress report (PDF)