State-owned Firm Loses Bulgaria Finance Ministry IT Monopoly

The building of the Bulgarian Finance Ministry in downtown Sofia. Photo by BGNES

Bulgaria's State-owned Information Services company will no longer have monopoly on the IT services for the Finance Ministry, according to the public tender results announced Tuesday.

The Information Services, whose last contract is from 2007, will only implement Lot 4 of the public order while 3 consortiums will serve the other 3.

The review of more than 40 000 pages of offers' documentation took almost three weeks - longer than initially planned, because the Ministry asked all bidders for information explaining the big price differences.

From a total of 13 bids from 10 companies and consortiums, 4 consortiums have been discarded through technical assessment and 1 company was dropped after opening the price offers because they failed to provide a sound explanation as to why their price was 30% lower than the average.

The winners of the other three lots are the consortiums that filed the best offers. Lot 1 was won by Siemens, Kontrax and Paraflow for BGN 11.73 M. Stone CNSys won lot 2 with a BGN 10.437 M bid. Lot 3 will cost BGN 7.245 M and will be implemented by the VCA consortium. Information Services won lot 4 of the contract with a BGN 725,800 offer.

The 10-day deadline to appeal the results began Tuesday, and the contracts will be signed after that period.

Until now IT services have cost the Ministry BGN 54 M, with the new contracts the amount is reduced in half – BNG 27 M.

Half of the profits of the State-owned Information Services company have come from the Finance Ministry, while the other half was generated through the processing of election results.

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