ONE will concede contract without bidding

SANTO DOMINGO. The National Statistics Office (ONE) would contract, no matter what, the consortium of Sinergit-Active Software on a direct no-bid basis, for the printing and data collection of the IX National Population and Housing Census, because supposedly there is no longer any time to hold a tender.

This will happen in spite of the fact that the Directorate of Public Contracts annulled the concession of the contract to this company by the agency due to a series of irregularities detected during the process.

It went so far as informing Diario Libre that supposedly they already had the printed materials in Customs, ion spite of the questions raised by the lack of transparency with which the issue was handled.

The affirmation comes with the announcement by the ONE that "they will seek the mechanisms of exception that are established in the law in order that the contracts for the carrying out of the census on the dates programmed are signed", since there are real impediments against calling for a new tender because there is no time to fulfill the deadlines established by the law".

Another important bit of information indicates that the Sinergit-Active Software consortium is no more than the fusion of the former Datacentro, with some of its old executives, who changed the name for that of Sinergit that now joined Active Software of Uruguay to carry out the same work.

It will be remembered that the 2002 National Population and Housing Census, whose results are questioned even today by the failure in obtaining survey data, was carried out by Active Software-Datacentro.

A recount of past events

The contracting of the company that will provide the services of printing the materials and obtaining the data for the IX National Population and Housing Census, has become the Achilles Heel of this important event, which will bring the data on the Dominican Republic up to date.

The decision by the National Statistical Office (ONE) to terminate the contract with Sinergit-Active Software due to a series of irregularities that were detected during the process, could cause the postponement of the census.

The ONE, after a closed tender, chose the Sinergit-Active Software to carry out the job for US$3,995,000, a sum that was US$805,000 more than the proposal submitted by the Novosit and the third participant Scantron. Both companies challenged the assignment of the contract.

This represents a difference of RD$29, 690,000 between the offer by Novosit and that submitted by Sinergit-Active Software, the company favored by ONE.

The questions

Documents submitted to Diario Libre show that the authorities chose a company with cheaper technology and with the more expensive offer and that they notified, by e-mails to the other participants in the tender that they had not been selected for the execution of the services that were the object of the tender.

In the same way, the authorities of ONE refused to submit the adjudication proceedings and the evaluation criteria after the proceeding, obliging the other companies that challenged the proceeding to use bench warrants to obtain the information.

Also, the officials of ONE signed a contract with the Sinergit-Active Software on last 13 August, before commenting on the challenge made by Novosit on 17 August.

The companies that lost the bidding also accuse the ONE of violating the deadlines and evaluation procedures in order to favor Sinergit-Active Software.

The Resolution by the DGCP

On 1 October, the Directorate for Public Contracts (DGCP) released its resolution 16/2010, signed by the director general Eric Hazim, by which it declared the challenge made by Novosit C x A, registered on 30 August, to be well and good by virtue of article 67 of Law 340-06 on Public Purchases and Contracts and the modifications contained in Law 449-06.

This article establishes the following:"The regulations will impose which actions can be susceptible to observations and challenges, the steps that shall be taken with them and the requirements for their formal sourcing. All observation, challenge, claim or similar presentation that is carried out outside of the provisos of the regulations shall not suspend the proceedings and will be dealt with according to what is determined by the challenge.

Paragraph: The challenge appeal, in the first instance, will be presented before the highest executive authority of the entity that carries out the process, and in the second instance, before the respective governing body".

Moreover, in the numeral seven, this article orders: "The Governing Body can take timely precautionary measures while the resolution of a challenge is pending in order to preserve the opportunity to correct a potential failure to comply with this law and its regulations, including the suspension of the concession of a contract or the execution of a contract that has already been assigned".

The DGCP was able to prove, moreover, that the ONE did not carry out " a proper notification of the adjudication of the process, all the while that on 19 July 2010 it just informed Recurrente Novosit C por A that its offer had not been accepted.

Novosit C por A

The Novosit Company is a business group specialized in services, consulting and training in digital solutions and high technology. Its personnel is composed of technicians certified by manufacturers of the solutions represented by the Computing Technology Industry Association.

It is associated with ReadSoft, a multi-national company with offices in 15 countries in Europe, South American, North America and Africa. It has carried out 15 population and housing census in Ecuador, Peru, Curaçao, Guyana, Argentina, Laos, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Philippines, Ukraine, Aruba, Georgia, Ghana among others with over 500 million inhabitants counted.

Regarding Datacentro

The Datacentro, now Sinergit-Active Software, has previous failures to fulfill contracts, not only for the failure of the Census held in 2002.

Datacentro also benefited from a US$16.6 million contract with the Central Electoral Board (JCE), but failing to fulfill the contract, which caused the company to be sued.

The company was supposed to computerize the Civil Registration Offices, the new "cédula" and the photographic voting roles, a commitment take on in 1997 with a price tag of US$18.2 million.

On 28 December 2006, the Second Court of the Chamber of Civil and Commercial Affairs of the Court of the First Instance of the National District ordered the company called Inversiones Macro S.A. (Datocentro) to pay RD$50,000,000 to the JCE for failure to fulfill the contractual obligations they had with the election board in 1997.

Likewise, the court ordered the cancellation of the contract, attending the demands of the JCE lawyers in this sense, in view of the fact that Datocentro did not fulfill the specifications of the contract.

The DGCP

The Directorate of Public Contracts is the dependency of the Ministry of Hacienda that functions as the governing body for the System of Purchases and Public Contracts of goods, services, projects and concessions by the Dominican state.

The Directorate of Public Contracts was created by Law 449-06 of 6 December 2006, that modifies Law 340-06 on Purchases and contracts of Goods, Services, Projects and Concessions.

Diario Libre