The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia says government will start an E-procurement process in public procurement by June this year.

According to him, this will ensure transparency in the processes and remove the delays caused by the hierarchical structures of the procurement system, as well as improve public procurement efficiency.

He bemoaned the wanton cases of corruption in the country, attributing the situation to the lack of transparency in public procurement processes.

He made this pronouncement during a surprise visit to the Office of the Public Procurement Authority(PPA).

“If you want to tackle corruption you have to tackle procurement. We are moving towards E-procurement. In June we’re going to begin e-procurement, which means that every procurement will have its own unique identification number. So you can go onto the website, enter that identification number and you’ll know the stage of the procurement and you can track it from each stage to the end.

So its going to be very transparent; you’ll know which companies have paid, which one is winning and everybody will know. There wouldn’t be any surprises that you don’t know how this company which has not got any experience or any records in doing this suddenly wins it. we are going to bring in transparency in the process. So Ghana will move to e-procurement hopefully by the beginning of June.

And its a new thing and in addition to that, they are going to do value for money audit for every procurement that comes in and due diligence attached to it. And I think it will be a very good thing for Ghana. It will safe the public a lot.”

The electronic procurement procedures eliminate manual intervention and ensure that there is transparency since processes are available online to give institutions an opportunity of accessibility.

The implementation of e-procurement would largely help cut down government cost by almost 30 per cent, since electronic system will allow for wide accessibility as many companies will be registered on the system.