Accountability and Value for Money Through Open Contracting (LR0034)

What is the public problem that the commitment will address?: Procurement is the single greatest corruption risk in the public sector. Millions of dollars are lost every year through corrupt contracting and untransparent procurement processes for public contracts, especially related to public infrastructure.; What is the commitment?: The commitment seeks to improve accountability and value for money through open contracting by adopting international standards, opening up information that can be used to judge the accountability of contracting processes and creating a forum to provide oversight of procurement processes.; How will the commitment contribute to solve the public problem?: If Liberia can link data across budgets with contracting this will be a key step in increasing public accountability. Publishing contracts promotes fairer competition, encourages civic oversight and helps governments learn from previous successes and failures.; Why is this commitment relevant to OGP values?: Contract transparency is essential for the responsible management of natural resources and the potential for growth and economic development that those resources can provide. Citizens have a right to know how their government is managing their resources in order to hold government and service providers accountable.

8. Improve Accountability and Value for Money through Open Contracting

Language of the commitment as it appears in the action plan:

"The commitment seeks to improve accountability and value for money through open contracting by adopting international standards, opening up information that can be used to judge the accountability of contracting processes and creating a forum to provide oversight of procurement processes.

If Liberia can link data across budgets with contracting this will be a key step in increasing public accountability. Publishing contracts promotes fairer competition, encourages civic oversight and helps governments learn from previous successes and failures."

Milestones:

1. Adoption of the open contracting data standard, a global open-source tool to enable disclosure of data and documents along the entire contracting process (the planning, tenders, awards, contracts and implementation phases) and application of this standard to identified projects;
2. Establish administrative directive and guidelines and ethical codes mandating application of the open contracting system for public contracts;
3. Publish all contracting data on the open data portal by default, which will also be compliant with the open contracting data standard;
4. Civic education on procurement and contracting processes to support citizens in understanding how these processes happen and their duties to oversee them, through a specific, time-bound sensitization campaign;
5. Establish open contracting forum comprising of government, civil society and the private sector to ensure sustained engagement, oversight and improved procurement processes. The forum will follow the open government principles of equal participation and co-creation and will be tasked to select a number of projects to monitor using the open contracting data standard and web portal.

Editorial Note: For the complete text of this commitment, please see Liberia's action plan at: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/documents/liberia-action-plan-2017-2019/

This commitment aimed to increase transparency and accountability of government procurement processes through open contracting. The commitment also aimed to adopt the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) toward the same end. OCDS is a defined common data model that enables disclosure of data and documents at all stages of the contracting process. ^[85] This commitment sought to address issues of limited civic monitoring and accountability in procurement. Such issues are due to inconsistent access to information, limited whistleblower protections, low capacity for fraud detection in public and private sectors, and the lack of applied conflict-of-interest mandates within the public sector. ^[86]

At the time of this commitment's formulation, the eProcurement Platform of the Public Procurement and Concessions Commission (PPCC) registered and listed businesses that could compete for public tenders. ^[87] It also provided information on calls for proposals and approved contracts. Additionally, the 2009 Liberia Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (LEITI) Act mandated open contracting in the extractives sector. ^[88] However, Liberia lacked public oversight mechanisms to ensure accountability in government contracting.

This commitment was not started and thus was not completed at the end of the action plan period.

Implementation was impacted by a change in administration, which led to a shift in policy direction and PPCC leadership. ^[89] LEITI also experienced leadership-related complications. However, PPCC continued to train government officials in procurement compliance, ^[90] and it enforced procurement guidelines. ^[91] As the commitment was not started, it did not change practices in relation to open government.

The PPCC's eProcurement Platform provides basic information, and LEITI, with its management difficulties, ^[92] struggles to maintain timely and open adherence from participating companies. Also, citizens—including the media and civil society organizations—do not perform proper or timely engagement on this issue. ^[93] Thus, OGP Liberia anticipates extending this commitment's contents to the next national action plan. The IRM recommends that during the next implementation period, the government drum up high-level political support by communicating the significant amount of government savings in countries with open contracting. ^[94]