Accra, Aug. 10, GNA - The management of Crown Agents, a private consultancy firm, on Tuesday organised a workshop for personnel from the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MOFEP) to build their capacity on government's policy on the procurement process to ensure value for money.

The workshop, under the auspices of Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, also aimed at disseminating to participants the principles, findings and procedures of the value for money audit as it relates to public procurement and contract assessment services.

Speaking at the workshop in Accra Mrs Effie Simpson Ekuban, Acting Chief Director of MOFEP, said government had since 2000 retained the services of Crown Agents (CA) to conduct value for money audits on high-value single sourced procurements with the principal objective of ensuring transparency and accountability in public procurement and contracting.

She said in 2003, the Public Procurement Act (ACT 663) recognised sole-source contracting as a permitted method of public procurement in the country, thus entrenching the need for the value for money audit in the system.

"To date, CA has reviewed more than 100 public project contracts for several Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) with the result that much value for money has been generated for the government," she said.

Mrs Ekuban said the consequent benefits included substantial price savings in the public project contract that had, through the value for money audit process with the resultant savings being passed on to the procuring entities, enhanced project scopes.

Others, she said were, improved technical specifications, performance criteria and contract terms and conditions, improved terms for conditions of contracts, greater awareness to procuring entities to develop better contracts the first time around including regular use of industry standard model forms of contracts when appropriate.

Mrs Ekuban expressed the hope that the workshop would build capacity of participants to improve government business with respect to single sourced procurement.

Mr Sam Brandful, Country Manager of CA, told Ghana News Agency that his outfit had the "unique capacity" to train MDAs in the public procurement process as far as the single source contract was concerned to provide value for money.

He said CA was determined to conduct an evaluative activity to assess the performance of personnel from the MDAs to ascertain the extent at which the training had positively impacted on their work.