
<p>Presenting the <a href="https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0Bzn2sNO0yoKGYmNmN2Q4OWItZTE5NC00ZWYwLWE1YTItMWIyZDI4OGYwNmMz&amp;hl=en&amp;authkey=CKzt9uMB" target="_blank">Quarterly report with the results from the public procurements monitoring in the Republic of Macedonia</a>(.pdf)  for the period from January to March 2010, Mrs. Vanja Mihajlova and  Nikola Tupancheski PhD stressed that there is still space for  improvement of the public procurement process in the country especially  in terms of more consistent abiding by the legislation by the state  institutions, and they also emphasized the need to further stipulate the  legal provisions to reduce the space for possible abuses in practice.<br /> <br /> The monitoring of the public procurements at a central and local level resulted with the following findings key findings:</p>
<ul>
<li>Increased use of scoring criteria for the bids which doesn’t guarantee the selection of the most favourable bid;</li>
<li>Inadequate criteria are selected for determining the ability of companies to participate in public procurement procedures;</li>
<li>High percentage of annulled public procurement procedures (20% of the monitored procedures);</li>
<li>e-auction is only used in 5.5% of the public procurement procedures, which is several times less than the legal threshold of 30%;</li>
<li>Rapidly increasing number of framework agreements concluded without specifying the ways in which contracts are awarded to firms;</li>
<li>The legal obligation to inform the companies in detail about the reasons for selection of the most favourable bid or rejection of a certain bidder is not adhered to;</li>
<li>The requests for submitting a bank guarantee for the bid as well as the amount of the guarantee are reduced,</li>
<li>The fee for obtaining the tender documentation is being slightly reduced.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: center;">{vimeo}12200045{/vimeo}</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">In the survey conducted for representatives of the public procurement  departments of 138 companies, members of the Economic Chamber of  Macedonia and the Union of Chambers of Commerce, the main problems that  companies said they were facing in public procurement procedures were:  vague tender documentation and technical specification, improper scoring  of the bids and favouring a certain bid; use of inadequate criteria to  award the contract, and late payment for the assets and services  supplied. The score of the companies in the country in the overall  public procurement process has dropped. The average score in this survey  is now 2.80 as opposed to last year's score of 2.93 (on a scale of 1 to  5).</p>