Efforts to speed up public procurement have led to a drastic drop in the time taken to process government contracts, civil service head Mario Cutajar said yesterday.

“Whereas in 2013 it used to take between 230 and 278 days to adjudicate contracts, the process has been shortened to an average of 115 days, which is slightly above the EU average,” he said.

Mr Cutajar was addressing a seminar for SMEs as part of the public service week. He said the improvement was no coincidence but the result of efforts made by the present administration to improve efficiency in the contracts department.

He noted that, last year, a threefold increase was registered in the number of offers submitted by electronic means: 26,000 businesses made use of the electronic procurement system. Moreover, a new customer care service introduced in October had already received about 1,700 enquiries.

Mr Cutajar spoke of plans to set up a compliance unit to ensure that procurement rules were always followed to avoid delays caused by administrative mistakes.

He said the government’s ultimate aim was to put public procurement within reach of a bigger number of businesses.

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