The Treasury is set to spend Sh560 million to complete the digitisation of its procurement system as part of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-backed reforms to secure transparency and efficiency in government contracting.
The system was originally set for roll-out in July but was affected by budget shortfalls, forcing the Treasury to provide special funding for the project.
“It will interest you that when I came, I asked where digitisation of the procurement system had reached, and I was told that we needed Sh560 million which was not in the budget. I used the power given to this office to sign off the budget under Article 223 and that money is now available,” Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi said.
The government has been in the process of acquiring an e-government procurement system (e-GP) that will place all public procurement and asset disposal transactions online.
The system is also set to enforce compliance with the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act of 2015 and accompanying regulations.
The developed e-GP system will also be interfaced with the Integrated Financial Management Information System (Ifmis) to process payments to suppliers.
The exchequer told the IMF in January that it was piloting the new system with 12 ministries and State departments.
The Treasury has already shifted claims payments to online platforms, disrupting cartels that have for long exploited suppliers and contractors through delayed approval of disbursements to solicit bribes.
An enhancement of the national Ifmis has shifted the management of purchase orders and invoices online in a bid to make the processing of payments to suppliers more efficient and transparent.
The enhanced system, which went live on February 14, 2022, has removed human interaction and will enable suppliers at the national and county levels of government to get purchase orders generated from Ifmis through email.
Emails and text messages will also be sent to suppliers at various stages of the payment process after the delivery of goods and services to the purchasing State entity is confirmed.
This is expected to weed out fraudsters who often exploit suppliers in the guise of facilitating payments at various government offices in payment of lucrative State tenders.
Apart, from having all payment processing systems online, the Treasury also plans a virtual system that will process all public tenders and be linked to the Kenya Revenue Authority in a policy shift aimed at enhancing transparency and nabbing tax cheats.
The adoption of the e-GP system is set to be complemented by other interventions including the enhancement of transparency of beneficial ownership in public procurement.
The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) has asked procuring entities to upload awarded contracts containing beneficial ownership information to the public procurement information portal (PPIP).
The PPRA has been conducting training with procurement entities to improve their understanding of beneficial ownership disclosure obligations. Only 842 out of over 33,000 procuring entities had registered with the PPIP portal as of the end of September last year.
