Question NW2083 to the Minister of Finance
14 October 2020 - NW2083
Tafeni, Ms N to ask the Minister of Finance
Whether, for any of the contracts that were awarded to the Public Affairs Research Institute and payments made up to October 2018, there was any declaration of conflict of interest at that time by any persons in the National Treasury and/or the Government Technical Advisory Centre; if not, what is the position in this regard; if so, (a) who made a declaration and (b) what was the nature of the conflict of interest?
Reply:
National Treasury has not awarded any contracts to the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) up to October 2018.
Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC) awarded three contracts awarded to PARI.
These were for;
- the provision of action learning support to the Eastern Cape Department of Education turnaround project;
- the provision of technical advisory services to the Eastern Cape Department of Education with the schools’ rationalisation project for knowledge management specialist advisory services, and;
- an expenditure and performance review of the National Language Services.
The procurement and selection processes for all three of these bids were fully complied with. They included a properly constituted panel, which followed all required governance processes, including the signing of a Declaration of Conflict of Interest form. Each of the individuals in each of the three evaluation committees indicated in their Declaration of Conflict of Interest form that they had no conflict of interest to declare.
There was one additional project undertaken by PARI during the period under discussion. The work completed was a set of longitudinal city case studies for the Cities Support Programme. The mechanism utilized to complete this work was a Memorandum of Understanding between PARI and GTAC which was in place. This process did not require separate procuring of the required skill and the work was therefore delivered within the terms of this MoU.