Translated material
FAS took up science
The Law on State Procurement (94-FZ) has long become one of the biggest problems of Russian science. The main difficulty was and, alas, still is that this law describes general rules that apply to the field of science, without taking into account its specifics. At the beginning of September, the Ministry of Economic Development presented a draft law on the Federal Contract System [1], which should replace the current law on public procurement. The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) came out very sharply against the bill, whose employees seem to consider any attempt to replace 94-FZ with another law a crime and an attempt to plunder the country. On September 15, the FAS published a huge package of amendments that should improve 94-FZ [2]. This document devotes a lot of space to the specifics of “placing orders for research and development work.”
First, let's look at the general scheme of holding competitions, as it is seen by FAS employees. The presented document describes in extremely scrupulous and detailed terms the proposed rules for placing an order for large-scale research work (more than 30 million rubles). To consider such applications, expert councils (50 people each) are formed for each branch of science in accordance with the range of specialties of scientific employees.
Applications for participation in the competition consist of two parts. The first part of the application contains only information about the quality of the work (i.e., the content of the project). It is assumed that the examination will take place blindly, so the first part of the application does not contain information about the organization that submitted the application.
All first parts of applications submitted for one lot are sent to ten randomly selected experts, each of whom reviews all applications and ranks them by level. That is, the best application receives 10 points, the second best - 9, etc. The expert writes a motivated review for each application. It is clear that such an examination completely excludes the case of a large number of applications for one lot, since ranking a large number of projects and giving motivated feedback to each application is almost impossible for one person.
Then the results of the examination (grades given) are posted on the website, and the second parts of the applications, containing information about the applicants and price proposals, are sent to the customer’s competition commission, which considers the qualifications of the competition participants and the contract price.
The second part of the application contains copies of various documents that must prove the competence of the competition participant. In particular, to confirm qualifications, information is provided on the number and volume of government contracts completed by the organization. But such information, although it serves as confirmation that the organization performed work under contracts, does not say anything about its ability to successfully solve this particular project. The possibility that the work will be carried out by some separate laboratory, and not by the entire organization as a whole, is completely ignored. Let me suggest that a list of publications or received patents of the direct executors could say more about the prospects of the project than copies of executed government contracts, acceptance certificates and other meaningless documents that, according to the idea of the developers of the law, must be provided.
The competition committee evaluates the participant’s qualifications. Moreover, the main number of points is given by the maximum value of the contract executed by the customer (10%), the total cost of completed projects (5%), the number of completed contracts, the price of which is at least 20% of the initial price of the contract for the right to conclude a competition (5%) , assessment of the qualifications of the competition participant (5%). It is easy to see that all these criteria do not apply to the creative team that will do the work, but to the entire organization. But what seems to be the most important thing - the assessment of the creative team itself - has a significance of only 5%.
Finally, the price is also assessed. In this case, the significance of price is 35%, i.e. less than it is now.
So the proposed project contains some very reasonable ideas. First of all, the separately prescribed scientific examination is striking. However, it is surprising that the content of the application and the qualifications of the participant will be assessed by different people. These are interconnected things. Ultimately, you can dream up the most wonderful project, but it is extremely important to establish its feasibility during the examination. And the entire assessment of qualifications, not only is it based on completely formal criteria, it also occurs in complete isolation from the analysis of the content of the project.
The criteria by which participants are supposed to be admitted to the competition deserve separate discussion. FAS really does not like the prequalification procedure, when it is possible to limit the number of participants in the competition based on some parameters established at the planning stage. The FAS believes that this will lead to bureaucratic arbitrariness and proposes “economic prequalification.” In this case, this procedure works as follows: only organizations that have already carried out research work under contracts, the cost of which is at least 20% of the initial cost of the contract for which the competition is being held, are allowed to participate in the competition. However, such formal prequalification (again of the organization, and not of the team that will perform the work) looks strange, since what is important is not whether the organization has carried out some abstract projects, but whether it has experience in the field of contract, whether it has the necessary work equipment, employees, etc. Finally, modern science is extremely dynamic, new scientific teams can arise and disappear, and this procedure excludes the participation of new scientific organizations in the competition, even if there is a Nobel laureate working in each room. The second condition for admission to the competition for a contract looks even funnier: the presence of at least two “highly qualified employees (doctors, candidates of sciences)” on the organization’s staff. Let me remind you that we are talking about contracts worth more than 30 million rubles.
The requirement for economic prequalification also applies to competitions worth less than 30 million rubles. But there are no changes in terms of the examination of such competitions or the transparency of their organization in the draft law presented by the FAS. Apparently, the department does not believe that there are any problems in this area.
To summarize, we can say that the main shortcomings of the proposed scheme are rooted in the defects of the very method of distributing funding for research work through government contracts. It would be more logical to organize competitions within the framework of a grant system, which was created precisely to take into account the specifics of scientific activity as much as possible. But for now, funding for scientific funds tends to decline, which means that we will have to read documents more than once, designed to once again improve the procedures for “placing orders for research work.”
Evgeny Sheval