Pathology of Tender and Auction Process and Identifying its Corruption

One of the ways that legislators have predicted for providing the needs of government agencies, as well as selling items, estate and products is tender and auction. This process is in major transactions and according to the method of notification, the acceptance of offers, sometimes collusion in transactions through the sale of information (information rent) related to a transaction, ambiguity in the conditions of tender and auction documents, lack of transparency in terms and coordinates of required items, the mixture of normal and defective items, declaration as surplus and sometimes failure to comply with promises stipulated in the process of holding and selecting a contractor as well as signing a contract and subsequently lack of effective supervision by a supervisory unit on the contract with the contractor or consultant, the preparation and approval of formal statements due to their nature as well as the existence of much financial scope and the proposed issue of public property in it have drawn private and public authorities’ interest to make the corruption visible. It is worth noting that factors such as validation of vague, imprecise, and conditional offers out of the time prescribed by corresponding rules and documents; agreement after the formalities of the transaction; lack of an appropriate need assessment program, effort to provide unnecessary items; false and sometimes unrealistic initial estimate, failure to give a receipt to beneficiaries after delivering envelopes; justification of a plan economically and environmentally, an approach to tender documents in favor of a specific person and limiting competition; intentional complexity of tender documents for making the supervision difficult; lack of proper and special criterion as well as the use of subjective criteria for evaluating tenderers and in some cases, to apply intention or exert influence with having a specific purpose; misuse of emergency situations such as natural disasters, war and etc.; to pay bribes to increase the rank of contractors; to enter into the short list and exit from the blacklist; to leave the tender formalities as a principle of offering a very high price to win the person concerned; an agreement of influencing factors with buyers of items in auctions; collusion to offer low prices; entry of fixers, etc. are considered as the instances of corruption in government transactions.