Public Procurement and Concessions Commission

The Public Procurement and Concessions Commission (PPCC) was established by an act of the same name in 2005 with a mandate to "ensure the economic and efficient use of public funds in public procurement", replacing the Contract and Monopolies Commission. The PPCC became autonomous in 2010 through the Amended and Restated PPCC Act.

The PPCC's Chairman as of October 2013 was Willie Belleh, Jr.

=Role and responsibility= The PPCC's function is to oversee, regulate and monitor all forms of public procurement and concessions practices in Liberia. The PPCC also publishes government procurement statistics: for 2008-2010, for example, it reported 96 contracts worth US $21 million. According to PPCC Chairman Willie Belleh, Jr., speaking in October 2010, the public procurement of goods, services and works accounts for over 63 percent of the national budget, as gold, diamond, and timber are usually contracted out to foreign investors through concessions.

Regarding the petroleum sector, the PPCC is a watchdog body that is tasked with ensuring transparency, accountability, and good governance in the concession negotiation process. The PPCC approves all agreements, including oil contracts and investment agreements, to which the Liberian government is a party or which affects assets owned by the Liberian Government.

Its primary monitoring responsibility is to conduct independent reviews of complaints related to the negotiation process in order to determine whether there was wrongdoing on the part of the government. But it only undertakes such an investigation upon submission of a complaint, and does not take initiative to monitor the process on its own, according to the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR).

The PPCC was created with a mandate of:


 * Maximizing economy and efficiency in procurement, and obtaining best value for public expenditures;
 * Promoting economic development of the country;
 * Promoting integrity, fairness, accountability and public confidence in the procurement process;
 * Achieving transparency in the procedures, processes and decisions relating to procurement and concession agreements;
 * Decentralizing public procurement to procuring entities;
 * Eradicating monopolies and promoting competitiveness in the concession procurement process.

=Limitations= The PPCC benefits from bilateral and multilateral donors’ support and technical assistance, but according to the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Center, inadequate funding has hampered the PPCC's operational effectiveness, and limited manpower has made monitoring contracts and procurement difficult.

The PPCC’s monitoring capacity is limited in that it is only responsible for examining the concessions awarding process. Its mandate does not cover monitoring compliance of concession agreements after they are ratified, once corporate operations begin. Furthermore in an interview for the CICR report published in January 2012, PPCC policy officials explained that their concession-related responsibilities were close to ending due to the new National Bureau of Concessions (NBC), established in September 2011, which takes responsibility for monitoring the performance of primary government revenue sources. The PPCC officials said in the interview that they had begun to pay less attention to their responsibilities regarding concessions in anticipation of losing their oversight role.

=External links= An Act Creating the Public Procurement and Concessions Commission, 2005

=References=