About 25-30% of the direct procurement contracts concluded by the Romanian public hospitals are suspicious, said Bogdan Puscas, president of the National Agency for Public Procurement (ANAP).

He added that the healthcare sector records most irregularities in the public procurement sector, reports local News.ro.

Puscas explained that one of the most used methods of fraud is breaking large contracts into smaller ones, to avoid initiating open tenders.

The low level of professionalization of the employees working in the public procurement system is a danger as great as corruption, the ANAP president added. Employees are qualified as public procurement experts following a 40-hour class, which is not enough. Puscas mentioned that he is trying to increase the number of training hours a public procurement expert needs to take to over 300, the equivalent of at least two months of school with six hours per day.

ANAP is an institution set up in 2015. It is subordinate to the Finance Ministry and has the role of checking the procurement contracts closed by public institutions.

editor@romania-insider.com