Under a subcontract with Deloitte Consulting, DPI was awarded a five-year USAID Improving Public Procurement Project in Serbia. The overall goal of the activity is to strengthen the institutional capacities for the management and oversight of a fair, open, non-discriminatory, and transparent public procurement process.
The project will particularly focus on bringing public procurement processes increasingly in line with international standards, working on sustainable tools and approaches for analyzing procurement data, identifying points of increased risk of corruption and wrongdoings, and providing capacity building for risk mitigation, including procurement officer certification program. The Project will also work with the units of local self-governance to strengthen their capacities for effectively creating, tracking, monitoring, and reporting on procurement plans. To improve procurement oversight, the Project will partner with the State Audit Institution, the Parliament, the Ministry of Finance, and civil society and media to provide training, and support the development of processes and tools for audit, oversight, and investigative journalism.
To support legal enforcement, DPI will work with public prosecutor’s offices, the Commission on Protection of Bidders’ Rights, and the judiciary, providing training, legislative framework and operational process improvements, database development, legal reform advice, and inter-institutional coordination activities. DPI will partner with institutions like the Judicial Academy, University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, and the National Academy for Public Administration in delivering capacity building activities, focusing also on young judges and prosecutors and strengthening their knowledge and skills in dealing with the specifics of cases from the area of public procurement. Greater opportunities for establishing lines of communication and a continuous dialogue within a broad universe of public procurement stakeholders will also be explored, as well as operational and technical preconditions for enabling interconnectivity between existing systems and better data exchange.
Project assistance is expected to improve public procurement planning, decrease opportunities for corruption and mismanagement in public procurement procedures, and all phases of the process, with improved capacities for more effective legal enforcement, and better oversight.