When Well-Intentioned Legal Reform Goes Awry : A Case Study of Legal Loopholes and Challenges to Anti-Corruption Reform of Russia ’ s Complex Procurement System
Service ( FAS ) stands on the side of the customer , arguing that the purpose of government procurement is not only to obtain the lowest contract price , but also to receive quality services , and the quality of the service is determined , including , by a short time of its rendering . This position was formulated in the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation of 12 / 28 / 2010 No 11017 / 10 in case No . A06-6611 / 2009 .
The most common violation of the interests of public procurement participants is , of course , legal linguistic uncertainty , ambiguity , entanglement , or excessive detail in describing the quality , volume , composition of the work and services required and the quality of the goods required . In this regard , unscrupulous customers come up with many tricks . The most common option is to entangle the technical part of the documentation , use a mass of punctuation marks that have different meanings for the procurement participant , use the words “ more ”, “ less ” in different combinations , sometimes replacing them with different signs and words-synonyms , putting these words in different columns and in the most unexpected places , sometimes small or even barely visible font . Also , one of the very common tricks of customers is the placement of information about the purchased goods and their requirements in an unreadable format or in a format that does not allow copying and searching for text . With a small amount of goods , this is not so critical . However , such technical assignments often include several hundred items and occupy several hundred sheets .
For example , in the purchase of 0372200258515000337 requirements for goods took 86 sheets of paper ( Russian Federal Treasury , 2018 ). In the purchase of 0373200173915001449 requirements for goods took 70 sheets ( Russian Federal Treasury , 2018 ). In the purchase of 0373200041515000502-130 sheets ( Russian Federal Treasury , 2018 ). But the greatest surprise was the purchase of 0172200000416000002 , there were 679 commodity items in it ( Russian Federal Treasury , 2018 ). Whether such a vast number of requirements for goods is a real need of the customer or his trick to get rid of unnecessary suppliers , that is necessary to understand objectively in each particular case .
P . 2 of Part 1 of Art . 33 has given customers a great imagination to compile the technical part of the procurement documentation . In the descriptions of the goods , it is now increasingly possible to meet numerous riddles on the knowledge of many documents of the national standardization system . It is obvious that it is much easier for the customer himself to simply specify the requirements for the goods to meet one or another specific standard , than to rewrite a huge number of conditions from it to the technical part , sometimes replacing specific values with ranges that the purchaser must turn again into specific values to receive a right of participating in the auction . It is worth noting that this empty labor of specialists of the contractual services of the customer is also paid from the budget . For a procurement participant , filling out such
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