Reshuffle Hits Bulgaria's Flawed Registry Agency

The leadership of Bulgaria's Registry Agency will be dismissed following the recent discovery of public procurement orders' violations, the justice minister has announced.

"The results of the audit that I commissioned were much worse than I expected. I want to stress that the biggest problem at the Registry Agency are not the winding queues of people in front of its desks, but namely what the audit came up with," Minister Margarita Popova said at a press conference on Thursday.

The agency is currently headed by Anastas Georgiev. The name of his successor will be announced in the next few days.

Earlier in the week the National Audit Office (NAO) announced it has discovered public procurement orders' violations at the Registry Agency in a probe conducted for the period January 1, 2008 - December 31, 2009.

During the above period the Agency had made public orders payments exceeding BGN 12 M, VAT excluded. The auditors found many violations in the assignment of public orders leading to large-scale waste of public funding.

Violations involve listing unclear and too strict requirements for participants and groundless elimination of bidders in order to determine the winning proposal.

The end result has been contracts signed for prices that are not competitive and/or much higher than the preliminary assessed value of the order. The Agency, which is under the Justice Ministry, had also contracted outside companies to carry out similar works simultaneously, which further led to the waste of resources.

The Agency further failed to identify potential risks at different stages of the public order assignment procedures and conduct permanent and effective control.

Some of the violations amount to criminal acts and this is why they have been sent to the Prosecutor's Office.

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