About 600 public entities are expected to be fully operational on the Ghana Electronic Procurement System (GHANEPS) by October 2023, says the Public Procurement Authority (PPA).
According to the Authority, after October 2023, any entity that is not on the system would be slapped with punitive measures.
Deputy Chief Executive Officer of PPA, Kwame Prempeh, who disclosed these, did not mention the kind of punitive measures, but it was believed such entities would pay huge sums of money to have their staff trained to effectively use the system, and be boarded onto the system.
He asked entities that were live on GHANEPS to conduct all their procurement via the system, which included request for quotation, national and international competitive tendering.
PPA, he said, would cease to process manual applications and request from entities who were live on the system, but not active users of it.
Mr Prempeh was speaking at the end of a five-day e-Procurement training for about 108 management and procurement officers in the Ashanti Region, at the weekend.
The implementation of GHANEPS is part of the e-Transform project being undertaken by the government with funding from the World Bank.
It makes Ghana the first country in the West African sub-region to establish an electronic procurement system for the public sector.
Over 150 training sessions had been provided to about 400 public institutions and 75 sessions to service providers (suppliers, consultants, contractors), while over 2,000 procurement officers and 2,400 management and other staff of the entities have been trained since November 2019.
Mr Prempeh mentioned that GHANEPS had been integrated with several other government systems for efficient procurement workflow, and that it was connected to the system of the Registrar General’s Department which helps retrieve the details of all service providers when they registered with PPA.
The system, he said, was also connected to the systems of the Ghana Revenue Authority and Social Security and National Insurance Trust to check the eligibility of companies partaking in public tenders, in respect of their compliance on payment of taxes, and social security for their employees.
Similarly, he said, GHANEPS was connected to the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) to pass on information for ease and swift payment for institutions that were on GIFMIS.
He said, GHANEPS could be linked to other enterprise resource planning system used by some public entities to create an end-to-end business process automation for the entities.
Among other benefits, the Deputy Chief Executive Officer, mentioned transparency would be ensured as evaluation and award process would be conducted online for civil societies, suppliers, contractors, etc to instantly access information associated with each tender and award process.
FROM KINGSLEY E.HOPE, KUMASI
