Bid rigging undermines the tender process which poses risks to the public procurement agency in paying goods and services at an uncompetitively higher price.
The Competition Commission Brunei Darussalam (CCBD), through its Executive Secretariat, highlighted the harmful effects of bid rigging during a dialogue session with officials from the
Department of Energy at the Prime Minister’s Office last Saturday.
Competition Adviser to the CCBD and Senior Fellow to Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne in Australia Dr Hassan Qaqaya also joined the session.
The Executive Secretariat of the CCBD commenced the session by discussing three key anti-competitive conducts prohibited under the Competition Order 2015 including Anti-Competitive Agreements.
The briefing was followed by a discussion on fighting bid rigging in public procurement.
Bid rigging is a form of anti-competitive agreements which is a punishable offence under the Competition Order 2015. It is a collusive activity between bidders or potential bidders that distorts the competitive tendering process by agreeing on who should win the tender and at what price. There are different forms of bid rigging, such as bid rotation where bidders agree to take turn in winning recurring tenders. It was emphasised that procurement officers should keep a data bank of previous winners to observe if there are any rotation patterns that may be deemed suspicious.
The session underscored the important roles of procurement officers in developing competitive public procurement processes by highlighting the key tagline ‘Deter, Detect and Report’. The tagline calls for the procurement officers to play a role in preventing and detecting bid rigging conduct, and to report to CCBD for any suspicious activity by providing information and documents including tender forms, correspondences as well as record of suspicious behaviours and statements.
The session ended with an interactive quiz and handover of educational materials including a poster on ‘Fighting Bid Rigging in Public Procurement’.
