Regular customers who use the ProZorro system spent UAH 6.3 billion during the last month of the year without organizing open competitive bidding. One in ten UAH of this amount has been spent on procedures which have characteristics of purposeful avoidance of open bidding. The procedures in question are pre-threshold procurement for amounts of UAH 190-199.9,000. Over UAH 600 million has been used for such suspicious procurement.

Just to compare, during the whole year 2017, UAH 48 billion has been spent through the reporting procedure. Thus, the December “reporting” figures are 1.5 times as high as the monthly average, or twice as high as a typical month (for instance, the January amount constituted UAH 2.7 billion).

This year, “December Harvest” is greater than last year’s figures. In December of 2016, UAH 4.7 billion has been spent through the reporting procedure, and UAH 555 million has been spent through suspicious procedures (for amounts of UAH 190-199.9,000).

The most active “reporters” that used non-competitive reporting procedure on the concluded agreement in December 2017 were institutions subordinate to the Ministry of Education and Science (UAH 34 million), MIA (29), State Judicial Administration (26), Kyiv Oblast State Administration (20) and MoD (13).

The biggest amounts through such procedures in December have been spent on procurement of construction works (UAH 173.5 million), oil products (73.6), furniture (73.6), office and computing equipment (30.6), construction materials (29.7).

The presentation of monitoring results December Harvest took place on December 29 in Kyiv.

DOZORRO’s public procurement expert Ivan Lakhtionov talked about the results of public monitoring in November and December of 2017. Members of the DOZORRO community processed 2816 procurement instances where they identified UAH 6.8 billion worth of violations.

He provided examples of problematic procurement. For instance, several military divisions of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine procured identical lots of fuel pumps over the course of a few days. The items were procured for the price of UAH 2,940 while the actual price is UAH 1,300. The Institute of Soils overpaid 40% at procurement of heating devices. Zaporizhia National Technical University purposefully divided the procurement item and purchased furniture through two identical pre-threshold procedures instead of open bidding.

According to DOZORRO coordinator, director of TI Ukraine’s Innovation Projects program Viktor Nestulia, bringing pre-threshold procurement under the umbrella of the law “On Public Procurement” would help to increase the level of competitiveness and efficiency. On the other hand, he is convinced that drawing attention to the problem of “december harvest” in the media and through CSOs will have a positive impact on the situation in the future as well. There are certain positive expectations concerning State Audit Service working more actively after the passage of the law on state monitoring of public procurement.

DOZORRO is a platform of public control over state procurement (https://dozorro.org). It is coordinated by Transparency International Ukraine. It unites 120 public monitors from 22 organizations across the country. It carries out monitoring of public procurement in the ProZorro system. From the moment the project started on November 1, 2016, CSOs have identified over 4,800 instances of questionable procurement for the amount of over UAH 18.6 billion.