Emergency procurement: Lessons on buying with integrity

This event is part of the 2021 OECD Global Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum.

We can fight corruption, fraud, and inefficiency through embracing open approaches to public procurement and beneficial ownership information.

Open Contracting Partnership and Open Ownership have joined forces to research the use of funds disbursed under the IMF Rapid Credit Facility. The research, due to be published in early April, will analyze which beneficial ownership and open contracting conditions and commitments were in place, how these were implemented in practice, and their impact on ultimate outcomes for the delivery of public goods and services related to the pandemic.

In this session, we will share the preliminary findings of this research and take a look at how MAPS can assist governments in fulfilling their open contracting commitments and pushing forward meaningful procurement reforms. Participants will hear from two country government officials on how efforts to use openness to combat inefficiency and corruption have fared, and what we can learn to improve the publication and use of procurement and beneficial ownership information going forward, especially for national authorities and international financial institutions.

We will ask each participant to advocate for the most urgent change they’d like to see to public procurement and beneficial ownership information policy to improve response time and effectiveness in the next crisis we face. The audience will get to vote for which policy change they would prioritize.

Speakers:

• Kristen Robinson, Head of Advocacy, Open Contracting Partnership (Moderator)
• Thom Townsend, Executive Director, Open Ownership
• Nicolas Penagos, Head of MAPS Secretariat, housed at the OECD
• Laura Kuoraitė, Senior Advisor, Public Procurement Office, Lithuania
• Silvana Vallejo Paez, Director General, National Authority for Public Contracts, Ecuador