The public of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) knows that after the aggression and at the beginning of the country’s reconstruction, a criminal system was devised in political circles to extract public money, either into private or party pockets.
In recent years, efforts have been made through legal reform to establish a new system for better control of public tenders and spending of public money. It is about multiple reforms of the judicial and prosecutorial system and the strengthening of investigative actions in order to suppress well-integrated corrupt circles. It is not entirely certain how much progress we have made in this field, but the fact that often thoughtless and elaborate solutions have led to new problems is evidenced by the latest case of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo.
For many years, the employees of schools and public universities are obliged to go to annual systematic examinations, which the administrations of those institutions finance from their own or budget funds, but after a public tender has been announced.
Thus, in 2019, the Faculty of Philosophy, in accordance with the current law and not for the first time, announced a public tender for systematic examination services for all its employees, over two hundred of them. One health institution from Zenica applied for the tender as the cheapest provider of services.
The management of the Faculty of Philosophy does not choose this institution because it would mean that over 200 employees of this faculty must go to Zenica for a systematic examination, after which the Zenica health institution initiates and wins a court case against the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, which is declared guilty of not choosing the most favorable offer because the text of the tender did not explicitly state that the examination must be in Sarajevo.
The consequences of this, we have to say, an incredibly insane situation is either that the Faculty of Philosophy now pays the expected amount to that medical establishment in the amount of several tens of thousands of BAM, mostly public money, or that all employees go to Zenica for an examination.
If the administration considers that it is more economical to go by bus, a tender would have to be issued for those buses, and that would be thousands of BAM of public money. However, the total costs for this systematic inspection from Sarajevo to Zenica would be increased many times over by the loss of a working day for a huge number of employees of budget users, through the costs of fuel and tolls.
Since this surreal case was also in court, the question arises as to why none of the lawyers and judges were able to understand and accept the costs of the trip to Zenica and back as realistic costs of a systematic review and then observe the total costs of the trip to Zenica as a total amount of money, Klix.ba writes.
E.Dz.
