We’ve been getting a lot of questions about what RosPil thinks of the 778 million ruble “upgrade” to the government procurement website.
This article in Izvestia has really stirred people up, and it raises entirely reasonable questions: They Will Spend 30 Times More on Developing the Government Procurement Website Than on Wikipedia *Market participants believe the costs of maintaining and updating the government procurement website are excessive. Let’s take Wikipedia as an example—a site with tens of millions of visits per day worldwide, suggests Andrei Sozykin, director of the IT company Corinth. Millions of pages of text are stored on Wikipedia’s servers, and new ones are constantly being added. Meanwhile, the site’s administration spends about $800,000–900,000 a year on backups and maintenance. Total donations to Wikipedia do not exceed $7 million a year, which is more than three times less than the amount Russian officials are asking for to modernize the government procurement website. Over the past year, about 200,000 bids were posted across all existing electronic trading platforms for government procurement. Usually, each one, together with all accompanying documentation, takes up 3–4 megabytes of storage. That means the entire archive of posted orders for 12 months does not exceed 800 gigabytes. That volume of information could easily be stored on any mid-range personal computer. Nevertheless, according to the tender documentation, the Treasury intends to purchase 70 servers and eleven racks to house them.* What can I say? The zakupki.gov.ru website, which RosPil works with constantly, is enough to drive anyone up the wall. It works atrociously, and there is constant scheduled maintenance. I honestly have no idea what the 360 million rubles already spent on “modernizing” the site last year went toward. Its functionality is not at all complicated, and for that kind of money they could have built something truly outstanding. The procurement website is completely out of line both with its importance and with the money invested in it. Now another 778 million rubles will be added to the 360 million already spent. That brings the total to 1.138 billion rubles. Personally, I have no explanation for a sum this truly staggering. If anyone does, enlighten me. RosPil will challenge this procurement. We consider it corrupt. Here’s why: If you look at the documentation, you’ll see that 92% of the contract price consists of purchasing equipment and acquiring non-exclusive software licenses. Only 8% of the price is for installation, setup, and testing. However, these different types of services have been bundled into a single lot, and the winner is required to hold the following licenses: • an FSTEC of Russia license for activities involving the technical protection of confidential information, specifically for carrying out measures and providing services for the technical protection of confidential information; • an FSTEC of Russia license to perform work related to the creation of information protection tools, specifically installation, assembly, setup, testing, repair, and servicing; • an FSB of Russia license to carry out technical maintenance of encryption (cryptographic) tools, specifically work involving the assembly, installation, and setup of encryption (cryptographic) tools. T***hus, for an ordinary deal to buy equipment abroad and bring it into Russia (92% of the money involved), an FSB and FSTEC license is somehow required. Why? The answer is obvious: to reduce the number of potential bidders; to inflate the price; to get a kickback. All the equipment is imported. The delivery terms are perfectly well known to everyone. Any assistance from the manufacturer with installation and setup will be provided—just write it into the contract. If some kind of encryption or special security measures are needed that can only be carried out by a licensed organization, fine. Hold a separate tender for that type of work and let them perform all their super-secret licensed procedures. The government customer is trying to feed us nonsense, claiming that in Russia only companies with government licenses can purchase and install equipment for a relatively simple website. In short, my view is this: someone at the Federal Treasury has already profited handsomely once from creating the government procurement website and now wants to profit even more. RosPil is filing a complaint, and we’ll keep you updated on the case.