The government of the Republic of Lithuania at its meeting on April 1 this year decided to require state government institutions to publicly announce more detailed information than is outlined under the Law on Public Procurement of the Republic of Lithuania about planned tenders and their procedure. The decision implements the initiative proclaimed in the program of the government for 2009 to ensure that public procurement is implemented in the most effective and transparent way, as well as to launch a series of measures for information dissemination of public procurement to make information on public procurements available for public viewing and analysis.
Currently the Law on Public Procurement sets certain requirements for making information public, such as a requirement to publish prior information notices, contract notices, contract award notices, etc. However, the government considers these requirements and the information provided insufficient to ensure observation and analyses of public procurements. Therefore, state institutions under government, institutions accountable to the government, ministries, institutions under ministries, and other institutions subordinate to the ministries under the said decision by government, shall announce additional information about the ongoing public procurement proceedings at the Central Portal of Public Procurement and their Web sites.
The government expects the Central Portal of Public Procurement to be adapted to the changes within three months; therefore temporarily such information will be announced only on the institutions Web sites. The government encourages other contracting authorities to announce the same information as well, even before the mentioned requirements are implemented under the Law on Public Procurement. It shall be noted that at the moment there are no initiatives that concern the amendment of the Law on Public Procurement.
These government institutions are required to publish a summary report about the planned public procurements in the ongoing year, about the tender documents and all other important information on the progress with procurement procedures, about contracts awarded and about the results of the execution of the public contract.
It should be additionally noticed that this government decision came two days after the decision of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania as of March 18 on the use of the means of the Central Portal of Public Procurement for the procedures of the public procurements came into effect. This decision sets the requirement for the mentioned contracting authorities to ensure that in the year 2010 not less than 50 percent of the value of the public procurements shall be conducted by the means of the Central Portal of Public Procurement, and for later years only electronic means shall be used for public procurements.
It is expected that the announcement of the sums of performed and planned procurements, shall allow those provide tenders to provide better and cheaper services. However, it is still difficult to comment until the new rules are realized in practice.
Rasa Narbutaite is an associate advocate at Jurevicius, Balciunas & Bartkus, a member of Baltic Legal Solutions, a pan-Baltic integrated legal network of law firms including Glikman & Partnerid in Estonia and Kronbergs & Cukste in Latvia, dedicated to providing a quality "one-stop shop" approach to clients' needs in the Baltics.
