HIRING A FAIRNESS OFFICER TO RESTORE FAIR, OPEN AND TRANSPARENT PROCUREMENT

More and more governments and their agencies use fairness officers for large, complex, high-risk or high-visibility procurements. This is done to provide proof to an increasingly skeptical public and vendor community that the procurement has been run in a fair, open and transparent manner.

A fairness officer (one of many names) is an independent external consultant who is acknowledged at being an expert in public procurement. The role of this person is to help ensure contract awards are fair, open and transparent.

During the last fifteen years, I’ve acted as a Fairness Commissioner in BC, and External Procurement Officer in the U.S., and the ‘RFP Gatekeeper’ in California. During that time, I’ve written about fairness practices and spoken at dozens of conferences and professional development events on fair and open procurement practices, the need for procurement reform and best practices.

This web site is a work in process. It is intended to be a source of information about the issues facing state, provincial and local governments and their agencies. It contains some of the sources of great information that I’ve identified and found helpful.

Before we start, a brief note about labels. In the U.S., an external consultant who is knowledgeable about the procurement function and is hired to ensure that the competition is fair and open is often called simply an ‘external procurement officer’. In Canada, the same person might be labeled ‘Fairness Commissioner’, or ‘Fairness Officer’ or ‘Fairness Auditor’. In Australia, the word ‘fairness’ is usually replaced with ‘probity’. So we have a ‘probity policy’ and a ‘probity auditor’. Different labels, similar roles and responsibilities.

You will see, in reviewing the links below, that this reference material is primarily from three countries: Canada, Australia and the U.S.A. Much of the material has originated from scandals - awarding contracts to 'friends', improperly restricting competition, etc. In Canada, scandals produce judicial inquiries (lasting years and costing millions of dollars) that generate great reports. In Australia, they generate great policy documents. And in the U.S., there is litigation and criminal proceedings (but not much procurement reform).

This website contains six types of resources:

1. Articles, Reports, Books and Press Releases about Fair, Open and Transparent Procurement

Relatively little has been published about Fairness Officers. A search using Google produces more than a million ‘hits’ for the words ‘evaluation’ and ‘procurement’; it produces only 85 for ‘fairness officer’ and ‘procurement’.

In this section, I have identified some major reports dealing with this topic; some newspaper articles, and a few press releases.

2. Great Canadian Scandals, eh.

After Australia, Canada seems to be a leader in defining the role of Fairness Officers and using them for high-risk, high-visibility RFPs. This is not without cause. In this section, we provide some information about two recent, highly visible procurement scandals.

3. RFPs/RFQs

The selection of a fairness officer is, itself, subject to public scrutiny. So, even when there is lots of pressure to find one quickly, don’t sole source it! Don’t select the person who is going to have responsibility for demonstrating fair and open competition by an ‘unfair’ and ‘unopen’ process. Take the time to do it right!

This section contains several RFPs/RFQs which in turn describe the skills, experience and work of a Fairness Officer.

4. Fairness Consultants

This list identifies people, independent consultants, who are experts in public procurement and have served as fairness commissioners, officers and the like in major public procurements throughout North America.

5. Codes of Ethics

While there are several professional organizations for procurement people, these organizations seem to focus on training and accreditation. None of these organizations has a strong public policy advocacy function pushing for procurement reform and fair, open and transparent competition. However, these organizations have promoted the adoption of codes of ethics and behavior by their members.

6. A Guide to Public Procurement for Elected Officials and Public Sector Managers

Several thousand copies of this 50-page guide have been purchased by public procurement managers throughout North America. The general feeling is that an outside voice is often listed to even if the message is the same.