LAHORE: A majority of Punjab government departments is reluctant to switch over to the online system for making “petty purchases” that carry an annual Rs220 billion budget -- a figure that belies the nomenclature of the expenditure head-- because the mechanism, adopted so far by a few, has started exposing corruption.

“The system is showing an item bought here for Re1 and the same for Rs80 somewhere else. So, most of the departments are reluctant to adopt it as it may spoil the business for many,” said a senior Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) official.

The Punjab Online Procurement System (POPS) is part of the Evidence Based Procurement Reforms (EBPR) initiative undertaken by the provincial government.

Its stated aim is to increase the fiscal transparency by using IT solutions to prevent leakages in the payments process, automate basic accounting and monitor functions (such as in-office approvals and sanction of funds), and improve fairness and monitoring of pre-audit by allowing online bill-submission.

All of these efforts result in more efficient procurement, and promote savings.

Under the age-old system, petty purchases up to Rs 100,000 are made manually, and mostly higher prices are quoted to the “mutual benefit” of the buyer, the vendor and the bill clearing Accountant General’s office. The bills are kept secret and no-one can compare prices of the same items purchased by different departments to detect pilferage.

The official said POPS automates the whole process and takes the complete record of petty purchases (allowed without inviting tenders up to Rs100,000) from requesting of an item to approvals, delivery and bills entry online.

He said only four departments -- agriculture, communications and works, health and higher education -- were at present using POPS. But the cumulative amount of all the bills of the four departments processed through the system currently stood at about Rs8.283 billion from the date of initiation of the system around three years ago.

The figure was extremely low because of reluctance even within these four departments to fully embrace the system. The health department which carries a huge budget has had 40 percent adoption (of the system), higher education 41pc, agriculture 83pc and communication and works 89pc.

The reason is that petty purchases had been allowing massive corruption amounting to billions of rupees every year, allowing the drawing and disbursing (purchasing) officers to buy items up to Rs100,000 at will. And the system, if fully adopted, would put everything on record and thus expose the plunder of public money.

The figures provided so far by these four departments had confirmed corruption at will by government officials. For instance, it shows a rim of paper was bought at, say, Rs10 in Rawalpindi and Rs200 in Lahore. In some cases, the price difference was found to be up to 70pc in the purchase of same item.

“Two of the most common items purchased with the petty cash are printer paper and toner. It has been observed that some cost centres have purchased these items at twice the prices as compared to others,” another official said.

“As this is one of a kind project to track purchases at basic level, it is being implemented carefully and in phases. In its initial stage it was implemented only at few cost centres. Only last year it was rolled out at large scale. But still this doesn’t cover all the cost centres of these four departments. And yes, as always in government departments there are adoption challenges; users are reluctant to use the system and add purchases.

What officials said next appeared to be more intimidating for the reluctant departments. They said the next step would be to notify the province-wise prices of all items so as to create a deterrence against showing high prices in the accounts. And in the third phase, the authorised purchase officers would be asked to seek prior permission of their higher authorities for making purchases over Rs50,000, they said.

Published in Dawn, February 3rd, 2017