A preliminary survey of Quantity Surveyors’ perceptions of the workability of the Public Procurement Act

Abstract

This paper studied how the provisions of the Public Procurement Act of 2007 contribute towards its workability, as well as what perceptions of the workability of the Public Procurement Act of 2007 are held by users of the Act. The study established a flowchart of general procedures for procurement of goods and services by the public sector in Nigeria, and conducted a questionnaire survey of forty (40) randomly selected quantity surveyors. The study concluded that the Public Procurement Act 2007 was viewed by the majority of respondents (66%) as requiring simplification. The Act itself prescribes a minimum of fifty-seven (57) individual steps to be completed before the entire process of procurement can be deemed complete and transparent. Recommendations were made that the Bureau of Public Procurement should reduce the cumbersomeness of the Act by providing a computerized database to hold most of the information that procurement committees would need to source manually otherwise (contractor registration, banking support, status of previous jobs etc).