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144 Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia
liquidity (including a financial guarantee or bid bond), are then considered
for a separate financial evaluation. This two-stage “qualityquantity”
evaluation is also weighted: typically the technical proposal
is weighted more heavily (70–80 percent) than the financial
proposal.
• Those firms that qualify for the final financial evaluation are invited to
a separate meeting in which the total financial offer of each bid is read
in public. The evaluation committee checks each offer—correcting for
mathematical errors—to determine the lowest bid. The winning firm is
then invited back, at a later stage, for final negotiation and contract
signature.
Risk: low to medium. In contrast to other areas of the value chain, the
stakeholders expressed no consensus on corruption risk in tendering and
procurement: their views differed markedly. In particular, although serving
government staff and drilling companies expressed confidence in the
process—noting that the demand for drilling services is greater than available
supply (reducing incentives for corruption)—other stakeholders
were more critical.
Some of the most critical voices were those of ex-government staff
with direct experience on evaluation committees, although their concerns
may be outdated given recent changes to methods and systems.
For these reasons, there was some disagreement over the risk scores
assigned to different elements of the tendering and procurement process
(shown in table 4.3), with the views of the study team (ST) (based
on key informant interviews) contested by the validation workshop
(WS) group. 18
Box 4.3 summarizes some of the more critical observations on tendering
and procurement relayed to the study team. These criticisms focus on
how government officials and contractors, sometimes in tandem, can
manipulate different steps in the process—from contract design to final
award. That said, none of the stakeholders interviewed was able (or prepared)
to cite recent cases of such corruption in rural water supply contract
design, tendering, and procurement.
In addition, some interviewees expressed concerns about circumstances
in which competitive bidding was not undertaken and about the
SOEs’ favored status in the process (as previously discussed in the
“Policy Making and Regulation” subsection). For example, the precise
circumstances under which SOEs acquire work in different regions and