Streamline Public Procurement (NO0059)

Streamline and improve public procurement by full digitalisation
of the procurement process
2018–2024
Responsible body Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries
Description
What problem for the general public
is the commitment aimed to solve?
Public procurement processes are only partially
digitalised – the potential gains have not been
realised
What is the commitment? Create more efficient procurement and simpler
processes, eliminate time thieves, provide better
coverage of needs and better regulatory compliance.
How will the commitment contribute
to solving the problem?
Streamline and improve public procurement by
fully digitalising the procurement process.
How is this commitment relevant to
the OGP’s fundamental values?
The commitment opens up the possibility of releasing
more information, improving the quality of the
information available and/or improving the availability of the information, so that it is more accessible
to the general public. Through increased transparency, full digitalisation of the procurement process
can contribute to mitigating the risk of corruption
in public procurement.
Additional information Full digitalisation of the procurement process will
be described in more detail in the forthcoming
white paper on public procurement.
Milestones Start date End date
2018 2024
28
Contact information
Person responsible from the
implementing body
André Hoddevik
Entity Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi)
E-mail/Telephone andre.hoddevik@difi.no / +47 913 97 587
Other public participants Brønnøysund Register Centre
Collaborative civil society
organisations, cross-sectoral
working groups, etc.

6. Streamline and improve public procurement by full digitalisation of the procurement process

Main Objective

"Public procurement processes are only partially digitalised – the potential gains have not been realised.

Create more efficient procurement and simpler processes, eliminate time thieves, provide better coverage of needs and better regulatory compliance. Streamline and improve public procurement by fully digitalising the procurement process."

Milestones

No milestones provided. According to the action plan, the commitment will run from 2018 to 2024.

Editorial Note: For the complete text of this commitment, please see Norway's action plan at https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/norges-handlingsplan-4---open-government-partnership-ogp/id2638814/

Commitment Analysis
This commitment aims to fully digitalise Norway's public procurement process to streamline it and improve its transparency. In Norway, procurement tenders, bids, and awards are published to the central portal doffin.no, managed by the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency. However, the documents that bidders are required to provide (such as tax statements) are not always digitalised, not always up-to-date, and can be easier to falsify. [31] For this reason, the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency plans to introduce a system called eBevis ("eProof") to Norway's procurement process. The main advantage of eProof will be that economic information on bidders (taxes paid, VAT, etc.) will be available and updated regularly, rather than with significant delays (as is often currently the case). [32]

The full digitalisation of the public procurement process is relevant to the OGP value of access to information. While this goal is verifiable, the commitment lacks any milestones or measurable activities that allow for greater understanding of the intended results. In addition, the commitment is expected to run from 2018 to 2024, well beyond the 2021 end date of the action plan.

If fully introduced, the eProof system could render the procurement process fully digitalised and provide updated information at the aggregated level and in real time. It is in the public interest that more information on procurements is made available to journalists, researchers, and other interested parties. [33] However, it is not clear from the commitment text nor from the interview how this will happen, nor is it clear what will be achieved within the two-year timeframe of the action plan (2019-2021). Therefore, it is difficult to assess the potential impact of the commitment (as written in the action plan) as higher than minor.

According to a 2019 report, data on the doffin.no portal is not currently available in open format. [34] Therefore, going forward, the IRM recommends making sure that data is available in open format and follows the Open Contracting Partnership's Open Contracting Data Standard. [35] Following the Open Contracting Partnership's recommendations on managing procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic, the IRM recommends collecting and clearly tagging all contracting processes and budget lines that are related to COVID-19 in the doffin.no portal to ensure high-quality, open, and complete data on emergency contracts and tenders. [36]

Commitment 6. Streamlining and improving public procurement by fully digitalising the procurement process

· Verifiable: Yes

· Relevant: Access to information

· Potential impact: Minor

· Completion: Limited

· Did it open government? No early results to report yet

This commitment was amended to include a description of targeted milestones in response to feedback received from the IRM in the Design Report. The commitment aimed to fully digitalise Norway’s public procurement process to streamline it and improve transparency. According to an interviewee from the Norwegian Agency for Public and Financial Management (DFØ), [34] the initiative forms part of a Norwegian programme for digitalisation of public procurement established in 2018. Norwegian civil society consider the commitment to be particularly relevant because no fully digitalised procurement system currently exists in Norway, and such a system would allow the public and CSOs to trace procurement funds and carry out related analyses. [35]

Implementation of this commitment was limited. Under Milestone 1, the fundamental technical layout of the raw-data repository (“data lake”) approach was established, and the DFØ is currently populating it with data, but data-protection issues (in relation to data included in procurement invoices, such as personal addresses) prevent the data from being shared with the public, stalling the rollout of an initiative to enable better access to information and clearer data on public procurement. Activities related to Milestone 2 on the use of the eBevis [36] service (to improve access to public registers necessary to certify suppliers for public procurement) were completed, but data-protection restrictions and the limited amount of data included in the system limit the solution’s usefulness. Updates as part of Milestone 3 that would have enabled better access to tender data in the national public procurement notice database (the Doffin system) have also been restricted by legislative barriers related to data protection (as explained earlier). [37] The initiative remains in its beta version. According to the interviewee, updates also depend on the development of related technical solutions for e‑forms at the European Commission level. [38]