Brasília – The Bidding Law for contracting infrastructure works may be out of date.
The lime shovel on Law 8.666, in force for 22 years, was launched last week, with the approval by the Senate of a Provisional Measure that extended the Differentiated Contracting Regime (RDC) to infrastructure projects.
The text, which is now awaiting President Dilma Rousseff's sanction, releases the use of this simplified bidding model to contract any type of logistical work.
Dilma has always supported the RDC and for years has defended its adoption for all public works, mainly in the area of infrastructure.
Provisional Measure 678, forwarded by Dilma to Congress in June, provided for the application of the RDC in public safety works, but the text was expanded in the Chamber of Deputies, with government support, and approved in the Senate with the amendments. The expectation, therefore, is that Dilma sanction the proposal.
The contracting of works by the RDC can be carried out in several ways, but the one that has been most common – and that causes the most controversy – is global contracting, in which the winner of a given work is responsible for executing everything from the basic engineering projects of the development to the specification of its materials and the final execution of the work.
That is, in the RDC, works are now contracted without the basic engineering project, a step required in competitions governed by the Bidding Law, by which it is up to the government to contract engineering studies in the market, to then bid for the execution of the work, according to the technical needs identified in these initial projects.
Management
The new form of contracting is far from unanimous. “In reality, the RDC goes against the whole logic of transparency that is sought in public management.
We are going to start contracting complex and expensive works, based on closed prices and without independent studies”, says Carlos Mingione, director of the Architectural and Consultative Engineering Union (Sinaenco).
For the vice-president of the Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Brazil (CAU/BR), Anderson Fioreti de Menezes, the model makes the government exempt from the responsibility of analyzing what will be contracted.
“The public power gives up its duty to define what it will hire and leaves that function to the company, basically caring about the price it will pay.”
For critics of the RDC, the government lets its guard down and makes room for contractors to dominate the hiring process, at a time when it should show just the opposite, due to the revelations of Operation Lava Jato.
“A well-designed project is a vaccine for corruption. What we are about to see is total openness to doing anything,” says Mingione, from Sinaenco.
Created in October 2011, the RDC was intended to accelerate the contracting of works for the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. What we saw in relation to the Cup, in fact, is that several projects were delayed and many were not even delivered until today.
In 2012, the model began to be heavily used in works under the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC).
The government claims that experiences in contracting works made by the National Department of Transport Infrastructure (Dnit) and by Infraero ensured the contracting of a cheaper work, since the RDC also allows an auction stage to be carried out among its participants.
The government also justifies that public competition takes place in less time, because stages of the traditional Bidding Law are eliminated.
Contrary to what happens with the 8.666, the RDC only requires evaluation of the documentation of the company that is declared the winner of the competition, instead of checking the situation of all those interested in the bidding in advance, as occurs in the traditional process.
additives
In 2011, when corruption scandals involving Dnit and Valec came to light, the then Minister of Planning, Miriam Belchior, went so far as to state that the government would now require the prior execution of executive projects – and not just basic ones – for hiring construction.
That is, there would be greater rigor in the technical details, to avoid the party of amendments that took over the contracts. Did not happen.
“What we see today is the exact opposite. We are facing a model that, in reality, makes inspection work more difficult”, says Anderson Fioreti de Menezes, from CAU/BR.
Source: Exam
By: André Borges, from Estadão Content
