JCC on OPR report: Focus on big spenders

The Of­fice of Pro­cure­ment Reg­u­la­tion’s (OPR) An­nu­al Re­port Vol­ume 2 for Fis­cal Year 2024/2025 ex­pos­es a pub­lic pro­cure­ment ecosys­tem char­ac­terised by vast pub­lic ex­pen­di­ture along­side per­sis­tent ad­min­is­tra­tive non-com­pli­ance.

Pub­lic en­ti­ties re­port­ed $15.97 bil­lion in to­tal pro­cure­ment awards across 141,479 trans­ac­tions. How­ev­er, un­der­ly­ing met­rics high­light struc­tur­al weak­ness­es, se­vere non-re­spon­sive­ness from key min­istries, heavy re­liance on mi­cro-pro­cure­ments, and mil­lions lost in un­ful­filled con­tracts and vari­a­tions.

In eval­u­at­ing these find­ings, Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil for the Con­struc­tion In­dus­try (JCC) pres­i­dent Fazir Khan un­der­scored the dis­tinct roles, bound­aries and le­gal re­spon­si­bil­i­ties sep­a­rat­ing civ­il so­ci­ety ad­vo­ca­cy from statu­to­ry state en­force­ment.