Participation in Public Procurement Processes (MN0038)

• Participation in Public Procurement Processes (August 1, 2020)

Main objective:
Increase citizens and CSO participation in procurement, contract performance and contract reporting in health and road/transport sectors and improve effectiveness, efficiency and quality of major part of public finance spending.

Brief description of commitment:
Undertake intensive actions to create integrated database on concessional loan projects/programs, aid projects, and internationally funded programs/projects and to ensure transparency and information disclosure to the public, establish systems to reflect the public opinion in the loan and aid programs and enable participation of public and CSOs in the implementation and reporting of public procurement activities.

Ambition:
-All information on the status of contrac performance and all other data are managed through http://opendata.tender.gov.mn website in order to continue activities on making government's procurement information complian with international open contracting standard. Outcomes of civil and CSO engagement in procurement process reported to and discussed by stakeholders on semi-annual basis.
-"Participatory" sub-working group, designated to identify needs based on participatory monitoring, established and projects and activities for 201 S and 202 planned grounded on Community Score Card results.
-National Consulting Team, responsible for developing and guiding the participatory monitoring and oversight, established through selection in compliance with Articles 35- 39 of Law on Public Procurement.
-Participatory monitoring teams with aim to develop participatory monitoring methodology and plan for health and road/transportation sectors to be selected in each aimag and capital city, in accordance with Article 52.3 of Law on Public procurement.
-Mutual Fund established by generating funds equal to 0.01 % of the work and services of the sectors and financial incentives for ensuring civi and CSO participation created.
-Glass account portal, designated to receive opinions and feedback of citizens and legal entities and getting resolved by relevan authorities, established.

Milestones:
1. Manage all information on the status of contract performance and all other data in the http://opendata.tender.gov.mn
2. Report and discuss outcomes of civil and CSO engagement in procurement process to/by stakeholders on semi-annual basis
3. Establish "participatory" sub-working group, designated to identify needs based on participatory monitoring, and plan projects and activities for 2019 and 202 grounded on Community Score Card results.
4. Establish National Consulting Team, responsible for developing and guiding the participatory monitoring and oversight, through selection in compliance with Articles 35- 39 of Law on Public Procurement.
5. Select and establish participatory monitorinq teams for health and road/transportation sector procurement in each aimag and capital city, in accordance with Article 52.3 of Law on Public procurement.
6. Create Glass account portal, designated to receive opinions and feedback of citizens and legal entities and resolve issues and concerns by relevant authorities.
7. Manage all information on the status of contract performance and all other data through the http://opendata.tender.gov.mn website in order to continue activities on making the government's procurement information with international open contracting standard.
8. Report and discuss outcomes of civil and CSO engagement in the procurement process to/by stakeholders on semi-annual basis

4. Ensure citizens’ and CSOs’ engagement in public procurements of health and road/transportation sectors

Undertake intensive actions to create integrated database on concessional loan projects/programs, aid projects and internationally funded programs/projects, and to ensure transparency and information disclosure to the public, establish systems to reflect the public opinion in the loan and aid programs, and enable participation of public and CSOs in the implementation and reporting of public procurement activities.

Main Objective

Increase citizens and CSO participation in procurement, contract performance and contract reporting in health and road/transport sectors, and improve effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of major part of public finance spending.

Milestones

1. Manage all information on the status of contract performance and all other data in the http://opendata.tender.gov.mn ^[29] website in order to continue activities on making the government’s procurement information compliant with international open contracting standard.
2. Report and discuss outcomes of civil and CSO engagement in procurement process to/by stakeholders on semi-annual basis.
3. Establish participatory sub-working group designated to identify needs based on participatory monitoring, and plan projects and activities for 2019 and 2020 grounded on Community Score Card results.
4. Establish National Consulting Team responsible for developing and guiding the participatory monitoring and oversight through selection in compliance with Articles 35–39 of Law on Public Procurement.
5. Select and establish participatory monitoring teams for health and road/transportation sector procurement in each aimag and capital city in accordance with Article 52.3 of Law on Public Procurement.
6. Create glass account portal designated to receive opinions and feedback of citizens and legal entities and resolve issues and concerns by relevant authorities.

Editorial Note: For the complete text of this commitment, please see Mongolia’s action plan at https://www.opengovpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Mongolia_Action-Plan_2019-2021.pdf.

Commitment analysis

This commitment aims to enhance public participation in the procurement process, particularly in the health and transportation sectors. Mongolia’s Ministry of Finance, specifically its Public Procurement Policy Division, along with civil society groups such as the Partnership for Procurement, MonFemNet National Network, and other OGP civil society stakeholders, will oversee the implementation of this commitment. Unlike Commitment 1, which focuses on transparency and participation in healthcare financing, this commitment proposes to increase transparency and citizen engagement in procurement processes overall. By proposing to disclose more procurement-related information, the commitment builds on and leverages Commitment 9 of the previous action plan, ^[30] which sought to promote a ‘glass account’ system to lower mandatory disclosure thresholds and increase transparency in budgetary spending.

Public participation in procurement processes was limited at the time this commitment was included in the action plan. More specifically, there was little to no engagement between the government and civil society in the process of enforcing and monitoring the implementation of public contracts in the health and transportation sectors. While the government has started to publish procurement information on the https://www.tender.gov.mn website, the information is not yet compliant with the international standards of open contracting transparency. ^[31]

Through this commitment, the government plans to publish procurement data on the web portal and achieve full compliance with the international Open Contracting Data Standards (OCDS). ^[32] As the portal is developed, the government will facilitate the participation of civil society in monitoring the procurement process. The process will see the creation of working groups to identify key areas to monitor based on Community Score Card results. A national consulting team will be formed to guide the process in compliance with Articles 35–39 of the Law on Public Procurement. ^[33] This commitment is, therefore, relevant to the OGP values of access to information and civic participation.

If fully implemented as written, this commitment stands to have transformative potential impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of public spending through enhanced transparency and public participation in procurement processes. The creation of a multi-sector procurement data portal would change business as usual in the practice of public procurement, as it would uniquely allow citizens to scrutinize the government’s contracting decisions—eventually even beyond the two sectors specified in this commitment. Compliance with OCDS would also provide citizens with easier access to information that would allow them to understand and be involved in the procurement process from beginning to end.

Going forward, the Ministry of Finance could incorporate a mechanism on the portal for government stakeholders to proactively respond to citizen feedback on government contracts and procurement-related decisions. Such a feature would be additionally impactful if it was supplemented with a strong enforcement mechanism, including for sanctions to be imposed on stakeholders, should the citizen monitoring process reveal contracting discrepancies.

In addition to strengthening the portal with an enforceable, public-facing feedback mechanism, the government could also consider publishing past procurement information for public scrutiny. It may also be beneficial to conduct an impact assessment identifying how the health and road/transportation sectors specifically benefit from citizen monitoring of procurement processes—the findings of which can inform efforts to expand the initiative across other sectors as well.

4.Ensure citizens’ and CSOs’ engagement in public procurements of health and road/transportation sectors

Limited:

Out of the commitment’s six milestones on contract transparency, two were partially completed. The contract transparency website was nearly compliant with open contracting data standards (OCDS) by November 2021. Minor outstanding issues included that OCDS related endpoints were not listed in https://opendata.tender.gov.mn/; getting data from the website required requesting an API token; and the website lacked an Open Contracting ID prefix. [12] While increasing the number of tenders listed on the website annually was not a stated objective of the commitment, this number doubled over the course of implementation, rising from 11,056 in 2018 to 22,604 in 2020 and 21,740 in 2021, [13] reflecting improved access to information on public procurement. The website lists entities that win tenders and copies of contracts, but no information is available on contract implementation. In many cases, tenders, contracts, and implementation reports have not been digitized. [14] In terms of public participation, the glass account portal (established in 2015 to make government bodies’ budgetary information publicly available) includes a feedback channel, [15] but participatory monitoring efforts and reports on civil society engagement were not implemented due to government budget constraints. The OGP Multi-Donor Trust Fund contributed to early implementation. [16] However, since 2016, the absence of a government procurement agency had disrupted management of public procurement reforms, [17] such as this commitment. As a result, this commitment’s progress was stalled by the delayed parliamentary re-establishment of the Government Procurement Agency, which took place in late 2020 [18] through amendment of the 2013 Public Procurement Law. [19]