Government procurement process ‘a shambles’ due to ‘untrained staff’

The government procurement process was a shambles, with untrained staff copying and pasting tender documents with no real understanding of what they were doing, according to Paul Quinn, the new chief procurement officer.

Mr Quinn has come from the private sector to help restructure and streamline the €9bn-a-year of government procurement which covers everything from bullets for the army to paper for schools.

Speaking at the Cork Chamber business breakfast, he said staff in public procurement lack the training to realise they are placing barriers in the way of SMEs when they simply copy and paste tender documents.

“We have a lot of people currently in the public procurement space who have limited training and limited experience. When they go to run a tender, sometimes what they do is copy and paste,” Mr Quinn said.

“It’s the easiest thing in the world, somebody else provided criteria on a competition for something; it’s great, just copy and paste what they did the last time. I’m sure that will be fine. What they may do is put a huge barrier for SMEs in terms of turnover requirements or assurances that they may not be able to fund.”

As part of the reforms of the service, Mr Quinn is going to recruit a specialised staff of 230 internally from across the civil service, which, he said, may be bolstered by some outside expertise.

“This is improving the professionalisation of people within procurement, we have very good people in procurement who are professionally trained and then there are a lot of people who do it part-time who aren’t particularly well-trained, and we need to change that,” he said.

It is hoped that by training staff the new procurement office will be able to provide consistency for businesses looking to bid for tenders and to save taxpayer money.

While the office will focus on achieving savings, Mr Quinn said it will also be trying to encourage officers to approach the tenders with a value as opposed to a price-tag mentality.