INSA Caught Lying? DKOM Found Irregularity
Company INSA continued to receive contracts from HAMAG-BICRO even after DKOM determined that the ISO certificates it used to prove its bid claims were invalid, reports Stijena.info.
Company INSA continued to receive contracts from HAMAG-BICRO even after DKOM determined that the ISO certificates it used to prove its bid claims were invalid, reports Stijena.info.
INSA, the company at the center of the current HAMAG-BICRO affair, had already faced a serious problem in a completely different public procurement procedure. In its bid, it claimed to meet the required criteria, but the State Commission for the Control of Public Procurement Procedures (DKOM) later found that the ISO certificates it used to substantiate those claims were not valid at the relevant time, reports Stijena.info.
In short, DKOM concluded that INSA provided inaccurate information in its bid. Particularly interesting is the role of Bernardino Katić, who was a director at INSA.
The earlier case is fairly straightforward. INSA stated in its official bid that it met all the required conditions, including those related to ISO standards. When, following a complaint, the documentation had to be reviewed, it was revealed that the company did not possess the ISO certificates at the time of submitting the bid, despite claiming otherwise.
INSA attempted to justify the situation by claiming that the certification process had been completed earlier and that the certificates themselves were officially delivered later. DKOM did not accept this explanation as sufficient. It was determined that the certificates were not valid either at the time of bid submission or at the time of public opening, and the complaint in this regard was deemed justified.
Despite this DKOM decision, INSA did not disappear from Croatian public procurement. On the contrary, HAMAG-BICRO awarded it contracts related to its operational software system after that case. In one procedure, INSA won a contract for upgrading and maintaining that system worth €160,000, and in the next procedure for the same system, it won again, this time with a bid worth €135,400.
So, this is a company whose documentation had already been the subject of a DKOM decision due to inaccurate information in bids, and it continues to receive contracts from HAMAG-BICRO.
According to the Public Procurement Act, one of the grounds for possible exclusion of an economic operator is serious misrepresentation of facts when providing information necessary for verifying the absence of grounds for exclusion or the fulfillment of selection criteria. The Act also provides for an exclusion period of two years from the relevant event for grounds under Article 254, during which the economic operator may prove its reliability by appropriate measures.
Therefore, it is crucial to investigate what happened in the HAMAG-BICRO procedures that followed the disputed INSA case before DKOM. The question is why HAMAG-BICRO accepted INSA's bids even though the lying in previous procedures was publicly known, and why it did not exclude the company.
Stijena.info announces that it will ask HAMAG-BICRO a specific question: whether, when reviewing the bids of INSA Investment Software AG in the procedures that followed the publicly published DKOM decision, it checked whether there was a basis for excluding that company under Article 254 due to misrepresentation of facts under the Public Procurement Act, given that DKOM had previously, in a completely separate procedure, established that the ISO certificates INSA used to support its bid claims did not exist. If such a check was not carried out, the public deserves an answer to the question of why not.
The current HAMAG-BICRO tender was announced for an amount of €200,000, and the deadline for submitting bids was only three days, two of which were non-working days. INSA submitted the only bid. Pressure is also growing on Minister Šušnjar, while SAFU distances itself from the affair, and the hot topic is being shifted to the Ministry of Economy.
