Penza, 12 December 2013. PenzaNews. The head of the Department of Placement of State Orders of the Penza region Sergei Mokrousov made a statement trying to explain why the region took the tenth place in the rating of corruption in public procurement of subordinate entities of the Federation, prepared by the public organization “Safe Motherland” for nine months of 2013.

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“The rating cannot reflect the real situation in the sphere of public procurement in the region. Numbers and percentage can indicate indirect signs of corruption, but they do not give a full picture, much less can they determine the level of violations,” he remarked.

Sergei Mokrousov added that many of the figures are facts of budget savings.

“For instance, the figures on parameters “the number of bids with only one letter of interest received,” “the number of bids with the reduction in the cost of less than 5%” can indicate that the declared value of the contract was reduced to the max with a purpose of budget saving, and that there is no one willing to work with it. Bidders also violate the rules of filling the documentation resulting in rejection of applications and reduction of the number of participants,” the head of the regional Department of the Placement of State Orders said.

“Each case of bidding should be separately considered and afterwards we can make conclusions. In addition, information on procurement published in the official website does not reflect average statistics because the largest number of regulatory requirements can be given to an average customer, and the major customer, by contrast, can follow all the requirements of the legislation of the Penza region,” the Ministry of Public Relations and Mass Media quotes Sergei Mokrousov.

As news agency PenzaNews reported earlier, the leader of the rating of the corruption in public procurement is Chechnya. The second place belongs to Dagestan. In top 10, there is also Kalmykia, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, North Ossetia-Alania, the Novgorod, Belgorod, Tyumen regions and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).

The Penza region took the tenth place in the rating. According to the data, there were 9,115 procurement procedures in the Penza region with a total sum of 24 billion 917 million 389 thousand 702 rubles.

In terms of the investigated parameters, the region got the following results: cases of reasonable complaints – 0,11% (10); tenders with only one letter of interest received – 24,25% (2,210); procedures with only one participant allowed – 9,94% (906); bids with the cost reduction of less than 5% – 51,14% (4,661); tenders when the ordering party refused to sign a contract with the winner – 0,26% (24).

The final index for the Penza region is 85,69 points.