Electronic government procurement (eGP) refers to the use of information and communication technologies (e.g. the Internet) to enable a more efficient and transparent exchange of information, and interactions and transactions between government and suppliers of goods and services.
Digital technologies are being increasingly adopted to achieve standardisation and consistency, which, in turn, speed up the public procurement process. Furthermore, the use of these technologies is contributing to greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in public spending by enabling more open, innovative and accountable public entities. Finally, eGP facilitates the simplification and/or elimination of repetitive and redundant tasks resulting in cost and time savings throughout the procurement cycle.
Over two thirds of the surveyed LAC countries have implemented e-procurement systems, often in the form of a central platform, supported by different modules focusing on different tasks and steps of the procurement process, compared to 100% in OECD countries with available information. In general, eGP is less common in Caribbean countries such as Anguilla, Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Saint Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands. In those LAC countries with an eGP system, respondent countries reported having on average five out of the seven functionalities specified in the survey (i.e. announcing tenders, e-submission of bids, provision of tender documents, online catalogue, e-auctions, notification of award and e-submission of invoices), with Colombia, Costa Rica and Ecuador reporting to have them all. However, in the case of Ecuador, the electronic submission of invoices is only observed in the e-procurement systems of specific entities.
Announcing tenders is the most common functionality of eGP systems in LAC reported by all respondents that have implemented e-procurement (14 countries). Furthermore, 93% of the LAC countries with eGP systems use them to notify contract awards. These are widely implemented functionalities of the e-procurement systems in the OECD countries, where 97% of countries use eGP to announce both tenders and notify contract awards.
Additional functionalities mentioned include online catalogues (71%), electronic submission of bids (64%), and electronic reverse auctions (64%). Finally, only 36% of LAC countries, including Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and to a lesser extent Ecuador, have enabled electronic submission of invoices, compared to 57% in OECD. Honduras has also implemented the Open Contracting Data Standard for releasing public procurement data on its eGP platform.
The integration of public procurement into overall public financial management, budgeting and service delivery processes could lead to better utilisation of public resources through improved information transmission, standardisation and automation. Of the twenty LAC countries with available information, 14 have established an eGP platform, of those 10 have achieved some levels of integration with other government systems and half reported measuring efficiencies generated by those systems. Integration with other systems includes budgeting systems (8 countries), financial systems for payment (7 countries), tax registries (6 countries), social security databases (6 countries) and business registries (5 countries) (see online Table 10.9). Chile has recently integrated its eGP with the financial management system of the State.
Countries are expanding their eGP systems through the implementation of additional functionalities and integration with other government technologies to fully take advantage of the benefits of digitalising the public procurement cycle. However, only half of the 14 LAC respondent countries with eGP systems indicated that they measure the efficiencies generated by the use of eGP systems.
