“Auditors appoint field inspections only in 6.5% of cases when monitoring has confirmed a violation. That’s not enough,” says TI Ukraine’s Director of Innovation Projects Ivan Lakhtionov.
At the same time, representatives of the State Audit Service say they would like to use other control measures than preventative monitoring in as many violations as possible. Which makes it even less unclear why they do not engage in field work.
On July 28, TI Ukraine has published its report based on the research of the SAS’ work. Among other things, analysts have calculated that the auditors found violations in 92% of tenders they checked.
Lakhtionov points out this figure is not necessarily shocking.
“Auditors pre-select tenders for ‘official monitoring.’ This means that 92% of confirmed violations is not all that relevant. This approach kind of twists the original idea. Procurement for monitoring was meant to be selected at random. Then its results would really reflect how widespread violations are,” he explains.
In addition, Lakhtionov points out that, out of the 92% of confirmed violations, only 39% are eliminated, and 0.7% are partly eliminated. There is no information whether violations have been fixed in other tenders. Which means that the fact of the auditors finding a violation does not mean the procuring entity will fix it.
