The Khairpur district coordination officer (DCO) and project director of the Special Development Project has been ordered to follow procurement rules for hiring consulting firms for different schemes in the district.
The CB director of the Sindh Public Procurement Authority (SPRA) Abdul Wahab Soomro has written a letter to the project director in the wake of their tender for hiring of consulting firms published in a newspaper dated March 15, 2011, asking him to extend the dates of bidding till the process is made transparent.
He advised the project director that Rule-66 of the Sindh Public Procurement Rules, 2010 provides steps of the selection procedures to be followed for the procurement of consulting services, so the expression of interest (EoI) should be prepared in light of Rule-73 of the SPP Rules, 2010 and a clear and unambiguous criteria for short-listing be mentioned in the EoI.
Thereafter, the requests for EoI received from the interested consulting firms shall be short-listed as per the pre-determined criteria mentioned in the request for expression of interest and Rule-74 of the SPP Rules 2010, the letter stated, adding that the request for proposals are to be issued to the short-listing firms as mentioned in Rule-75.
He further wrote in the letter that the evaluation criteria are ambiguous as the marks would be assigned is not mentioned, so it is advised that the EOI be prepared in the light of the observations made and a copy of it be furnished to the SPRA at the earliest.
In this context, the authority has informed the provincial chief secretary in reference to the letter No SO (C-IV)/ SGA&CD/5- 15/ 10 dated April 6, 2011, and said that the procuring agency has already been advised to rectify the infirmities in the tender and the bidding process. The copies of the letter were forwarded for information to the Secretary Local Government Department, Government of Sindh, Karachi, and the Director Local Fund Audit, Karachi.