Public body CPO LT activity in public procurement

• CPO LT's performance as a general centre of excellence for public procurement should be improved.
• Efforts should be made to understand the expectations of contracting authorities and suppliers in order to encourage the use of CPO LT services.
• More attention should be paid to assessing the funding required for CPO LT activities.

CPO LT is constantly striving to increase its professionalism and improve the quality of its activities. However, contracting authorities are still required to perform actions during the procurement process that require specific procurement competences. In other words, the delegation of procurement to CPO LT does not yet fully address the lack of procurement competences in contracting authorities. The attractiveness of CPO services needs to be enhanced by a more detailed assessment of customer expectations, and the allocation of State budget funding needs to be targeted and linked to a need that cannot be covered by the revenue generated by CPO LT for its services. These are the results of the audit "Public Body CPO LT Activity in Public Procurement" conducted by the National Audit Office.

The audit results reveal that there is currently no long-term vision and strategy for the centralisation of public procurement at the national level, which would define the problems to be solved by centralisation in public procurement and, accordingly, define the responsibilities and role of the central contracting authorities (including CPO LT) in the emerging centralised procurement system.

"Contracting authorities still need to provide the information used to prepare the terms and conditions and documents in order to outsource their public procurement to CPO LT. Understanding it and presenting it correctly and appropriately requires specific procurement competences within the organisations. In order to increase the added value created by the centralisation of public procurement, it should be ensured that CPO LT develops its full functioning as a centre of excellence for public procurement", says the Auditor General Mindaugas Macijauskas.

The improvement and development of CPO LT services should be based on a more detailed analysis of the needs and expectations of stakeholders in order to encourage more contracting authorities to use CPO LT services. CPO LT improved its internal procedures and processes, identified and implemented measures to identify customer needs, but did not consistently analyse them, and therefore did not have detailed information on the expectations of existing and potential customers, case law relevant to procurement, and the quality of the goods, services or works purchased via the e-catalogue.

During the audit period, there were no approved methodologies for setting the CPO LT service fees: in the absence of a set procedure for the revision of the fees, there was no established periodicity at which they could be reviewed. For these reasons, inappropriate assumptions used in the calculation of the fee may have reduced the future costs of some of the fee components and increased others. CPO LT carries out the procurement activities of the Ministry of the Economy and Innovation and its subordinate bodies free of charge, and the costs of these activities are covered by funding from the State budget, which, in addition to this function, is also allocated to various other activities. Given that the financial result of CPO LT's individual activities is not calculated, it is not known what additional funding is required.

The implementation of the National Audit Office's recommendations would enable contracting authorities to address the lack of competence in public procurement by outsourcing procurement to CPO LT.