The Public Procurement Agency (PPA) has submitted documentation to the BiH Prosecutor’s Office regarding the procurement of driver’s licenses worth 800,000 KM due to possible elements of criminal offense. The PPA’s response followed a report filed by Transparency International in BiH (TI BiH) after the Agency for Identification Documents, Records and Data Exchange of BiH (IDDEEA) awarded a contract to MUEHLBAUER at the beginning of this year without public bidding, using a negotiated procedure instead.
The procurement involved an additional 200,000 driver’s licenses, as the basic contract for two million licenses expired in December last year. IDDEEA attempted to use the legal option to procure additional quantities costing 10% of the basic contract value, but the legal requirements for this were not met.
As justification for this move, IDDEEA cited extreme urgency and claimed they could not change the current supplier, as it could result in procurement of forms with different technical characteristics, which would cause technical difficulties in the operation of the entire driver’s license issuance system.
In their report to the Agency, TI BiH stated that IDDEEA’s management unjustifiably avoided issuing a tender, as they had sufficient time, specifically 10 years from the conclusion of the basic contract, to conduct the procurement according to law. Besides the lack of extreme urgency, the special conditions for applying this type of procedure were not met since the basic contract was also concluded through a negotiated procedure.
Additionally, the explanation that changing suppliers could lead to technical difficulties cannot be acceptable, as this only bought time, and IDDEEA will ultimately have to conduct a tender.
After TI BiH’s insistence, the Public Procurement Agency of BiH conducted monitoring of this procedure, reviewed all documentation, and informed TI BiH that they had submitted a report to the BiH Prosecutor’s Office
“due to potential violation of the Public Procurement Law and possible elements of criminal offense.”
Irregularities in the procurement of personal documents in BiH have been ongoing for years, and it’s important to note that the procurement of passports in March 2017, worth 9.4 million KM, was also conducted through a negotiated procedure. The Audit Office for BiH Institutions had also previously concluded that over 100 million KM worth of personal documents were distributed without conducting a tender.
Furthermore, the former director of IDDEEA was arrested in 2016 on suspicion of accepting bribes and favoring the current supplier. However, the BiH Prosecutor’s Office neither filed an indictment nor issued an order to terminate the investigation for four years after the investigation began, which led to a Constitutional Court of BiH ruling due to failure to make a prosecutorial decision within a reasonable time. In March 2020, the BiH Prosecutor’s Office terminated the investigation in this case after a full five years.
