Penza, 9 April 2014. PenzaNews. The head of the Department of Placement of State Orders of the Penza region Sergei Mokrousov attempted to investigate why the region was ranked in top 10 regions with highest corruption rate in public procurement field.

According to him, finding the reasons took him a few days.

“At first, I decided to determine what data were taken into consideration. The official state procurement website under “Public control” directory, and then “Economy-94-FZ” indicates that the relative decrease in regional contracts based on 10,678 procedures made 5,41 % of 23,848,1 million rubles. In the “top customer rating” only the first ten customers of the Penza region placed 33,054 million rubles, of which 20,301,7 million rubles was placed by “Federal Road Department “Bolshaya Volga” [Big Volga],” Sergei Mokrousov wrote in his “LiveJournal.”

Further, he cited data from the Internet service, according to which the total contract price in the region amounted to 12,020 million rubles, in the municipality — 9,431 million rubles, and the total amount reached 21,463 million rubles.

“Obviously, the website experiences some operational troubles, as well as makes peculiar calculations, possibly due to incorrect data entred by our specialists — customers. In such oscillation, the indicators according to the website can be different,” the head head of the Department of Placement of State Orders of the Penza region noted.

According to Sergei Mokrousov, he agrees with the rating authors that the results of the study do not indicate the presence or absence of corruption, but oblige to take notice of the situation, including law enforcement agencies for possible violations.

“ I absolutely agree with this statement. The indicator “Substantial complaints” is the lowest in our case, but a lot of work should be done on the development of competition in the auction, including the improvement of the quality of planning, centralized procurement, training of customers and participants, and so on. The most important thing is not to try and reduce the work to mere improving performance indicators in the ratings of public organizations,” he stressed.