State bodies in the country of Georgia have to carry out de facto all their procurement (few exemptions exist) through a centralized e-procurement system that was set up and is maintained by the country's State Procurement Agency. More than 4,390 government agencies (including ministries, municipalities, schools, courts, and state-owned companies) are registered to use the system. The system is accessible to anybody and is available in several languages (Georgian, English and Russian). Through the platform, all documents related to government tenders are made accessible to the public, as well as relevant meta data.
To enter the site go to tenders.procurement.gov.ge. After setting the correct language (click on "ENG"), visitors can access the website as "guests" or create a free account, which will give them access to more data and to customizable alerts.
Data published on the platform includes: * Meta data on tendering process * All bids of all participating bidders, including their identities (once a winner of the tender has been identified); * All relevant documents related to the process, released by either the procuring entity or bidders/the selected supplier, whereby outdated versions of these documents remain accessible; * Budgets available for planned purchases from all public bodies in the current year; * Signed agreements and meta data, including outdated versions/amendments; * Payments made towards a specific contract; * Communication between interested parties and government agency to clarify technical details; * Whitelisted companies (preferential conditions for previous successfully delivered contracts); * Blacklisted companies (barred from public procurement for one year); * Complaints filed over a specific tender (which can be done by anybody using an online form on the platform), and decisions of a dispute resolution board addressing complaints (see also https://tenders.procurement.gov.ge/dispute/, in Georgian only). * Bills, receipts and contracts from single-sourced purchases, as well as meta data to these transactions, payments made for these contracts, and the legal basis for conducting a single-sourced purchase rather than a competitive tender are made available as well (one shortcoming is that users cannot see which purchases have been classified and are thus not published). * A registry with profiles of all registered users, government entities as well as companies.
Shortcomings of the platform are that there is no public download of data, neither is there an API. Contracts are not redacted, but users cannot see what documents or contracts are missing, and for what reason. Transparency International Georgia (transparency.ge) scrapes some of the data from this platform, repackages it and offers visualizations, e-mail alerts and bulk downloads at http://tendermonitor.ge (also listed on this site).
