Tender Board strengthens physical security of bid/tender documents-Puts measures in place to detect tampering

Apr 23, 2019 News

NPTAB Head, Berkley Wickham

The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) has taken several steps to improve its operations, one of which includes the strengthening of the physical security of bid/tender documents and putting mechanisms in place to detect attempts at document tampering.
This was revealed to Kaieteur News during an exclusive interview with NPTAB Head, Berkley Wickham. The official said while there is still more work to be done, NPTAB has made crucial improvements since 2015.
Wickham said that the physical and cyber security protection of the NPTAB software systems has been strengthened. He also disclosed that improvements were made to the ICT support available to NPTAB by integrating the existing software into the Ministry of Finance’s Integrated Financial Management Information Systems (IFMIS).
The NPTAB Head said, “We have also assessed the existing software to capture NPTA tender/bids and letters of award details and found it generate data errors around dates which made for erroneous reporting of tenders/bids and letters of awards data. This was corrected and the software can now produce more accurate data.”
“The software is also incomplete and does not support a bidders register which holds a unique bidder’s number which captures all of the bidders information in one place including the bidder’s business registration id, TIN of all owners, small business id number if so registered, biographic data on owners to support analysis by age and gender, type of business etc. This is being addressed.”
The official added, “We even engineered business processes to improve efficiency, effectiveness, coordination and value for money of the NPTA operations, clarify the required organizational structure of NPTA and task ownership to support the business processes, and to identify the time it should typically take to carry out each procurement method.”
Wickham noted that there was a restructuring of the NPTA based on the business processes requirement and a recommendation for a structure for procuring entities.
He said, too, that the Board has identified required changes to the Procurement Act to support an interim e-Procurement system and to harmonize the Procurement Act and the Small Business Act.
Wickham said that a consultancy was done to strengthen the Procurement Act to support e-Procurement and the Board identified possible e-Procurement systems to meet Guyana’s needs

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