With the aim of improving Albania’s public procurement system and ensuring well-management practices and transparency in the use of public funds, the government of Albania has finalized work on drafting a new public procurement bill. The draft law, designed to improve the public procurement regulatory framework in Albania by facilitating the procurement process for both contracting authorities and economic operators, is currently undergoing a consultation phase with interest groups.

In his remarks at a roundtable-consultative meeting with experts and co-authors of the draft law, which has taken into consideration the findings and recommendations put forth by various international bodies, including the European Commission, the World Bank, OECD/SIGMA, etc., the Deputy Prime Minister Erion Braçe stated that ensuring transparency in the use of the public funds and the fair competitiveness among the economic operators remains on focus of the government objectives.

“It is clearly in the government’s absolute interest to make sure that a procurement procedure is open, transparent, uninfluenced and a real competition takes place in every stage of the procurement, from announcement to the contract signing, including also a transparent, effective and quick complaining process. Fair competition and effective competition remain an absolute priority for us,” Deputy Prime Minister Braçe said.

He said that the government managed to minimize problematic procedures last year, something that is going to further be reflected in the changes to the existing public procurement law.

“Commendable work has been done last year. In 2019, there are only 192 procedures out a total of 7384, accounting for only 2,5% of the procedures, the lowest historic level in the last 10 years. Such procedures included an amount of 2.3 billion lek only out of 110.6 billion lek disbursed in procurement funding. Reducing this procurement procedure to 2.1% from 13.9% is a positive achievement. The proposed amendments to the draft aim at the effective competition,” the Deputy PM said.

The proposed legislation sets out simplified procedures and it is also designed to facilitate participation of economic operators in public procurement procedures, relax procedures for procurement of social and other special services, strengthen the Public Procurement Agency’s role, shorten deadline of the administrative review process of complaints etc.