Procurement breaches cost taxpayers $166,000 in legal fees

In the last year, sev­er­al state bod­ies have been found to be in breach of the pro­cure­ment law, po­ten­tial­ly cost­ing tax­pay­ers al­most $166,000 in le­gal fees. These in­clude three ten­der eval­u­a­tion fail­ures sim­i­lar to those un­cov­ered in the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion’s (HDC) can­celled $3.48 bil­lion hous­ing pro­gramme.

The find­ings in­volve the Min­istry of Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion, Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC), Paria Fu­el Trad­ing and the To­ba­go Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (TRHA). All four lost pro­cure­ment chal­lenges be­fore hear­ing pan­els ap­point­ed by the Of­fice of Pro­cure­ment Reg­u­la­tion (OPR).

Related coverageOPR Findings Expose Weak Vetting in HDC’s $3.48 Billion Housing Programme5 reports

In the OPR de­ci­sion doc­u­ments, Guardian Me­dia found that the pan­els or­dered the pub­lic bod­ies to pay a com­bined $165,920.83 in le­gal costs to con­trac­tors who chal­lenged their ten­der de­ci­sions - those are costs award­ed by the reg­u­la­tor, not fines.