Rare Purchase of Electronic Bracelets

An alarming trend has been confirmed on the government of Costa Rica involving self-supply between institutions and public companies under contracts that avoid the participation of private enterprises.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

EDITORIAL

The legal tangle that regulates state purchases in Costa Rica is a machine that forces to go out on a pilgrimage in order to acquire, for example, electronic bracelets for prisoners.

An article on Nacion.com, reports that  "... after a failed attempt to award an electronic bracelet system to a private company, due to high cost, the Ministry of Justice has changed tack. Now, the ministry is looking for a public body to take on the project to make it more expeditious and get a better price (it is estimated to be $30 to $18 a day for each person sentenced to use the device). "

"Making it more expeditious" means that the implementation of the control system for inmates on probation will be awarded to a public company whose technical capacity to carry out this task is not important, but it is important that the rules allow the contract to be signed outside of the system for controlling state purchases, something that the Ministry of Justice can not do in this case.

Because of this, one of the state-owned corporations governed by private corporation laws is an electricity distributor, which coincidentally according to its statutes can also provide "telecommunications and info-communications", but can not demonstrate any experience in electronic bracelets. Another is RACSA, a state enterprise with such disastrous management in the area of telecommunications, that it has only avoided bankruptcy and disappearing from the market thanks to the financial support afforded to it by its parent company and contracts with other state institutions that are obviously not too demanding in terms of the quality of the services they receive.  

It is unclear whether the intention of the Ministry of Justice is to achieve results of a procurement which otherwise might not come to fruition, or if the Ministry has simply bowed to the alarming tendency of this government to supply itself from among its own institutions and public companies with contracts that are interfering with free competition, preventing by preventing the participation of private enterprises.

It would be very interesting to see, if in the future, the actual cost of each bracelet is actually $18 a day, which would justify this rare procedure, or if, as expected, it will be well over the $30 which is considered excessive right now. Anyone want to bet?

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