Company requests annulment of bidding process for supplying 10 Caixa terminals.
The company TECNOGOV Comercial has filed a request to challenge the Electronic Auction Notice for the supply of 10 Lottery Financial Terminals – TFLs with trade-in operation for up to 11.500, including delivery, installation, warranty of all items comprising the equipment, and also any eventual services not included in the warranty until the end of the contract term, in lottery units and administrative units of CAIXA. The estimated cost of the service is R$ 261.883.935,40, alleging that the notice favors a small number of companies.
In the request that BNLData had access to, the company clarifies that the acquisition process began in 2020, with several public consultations aimed at discussing the new specifications for the lottery terminals. Several suggestions and questions were received from interested parties, and it is certain that the specification previously required in the bidding documents for these terminals could only be met by a single company, Procomp Amazônia Ind. Eletrônica, the winner of the last bidding process held in December 2019 for the same purpose, for the amount of R$ 191.030.076,20, without any competitive bidding process.
The company claims that since the beginning of the bidding process, several public hearings have been held and the specifications have been altered, but in January of this year, the National Contracting Center – CECOT/BR of Caixa published a new tender notice, returning to the specifications of the old terminal, which supposedly would benefit Deieblod/Procomp.
In addition to specifying the old terminal, "Caixa expressly prohibited the participation of companies in consortium format, thus preventing foreign companies that own the terminal from participating in this process, since, it should be reiterated, only one company in Brazil possesses it," states the TECNOGOV request.
The company also points out that prohibiting participation in the form of a consortium for a project with an estimated price of R$ 261 million "will directly benefit the aforementioned company, and the publication of the tender in this case is nothing more than a simulation of competition, given that it is already known who will be the contractor."
TECNOGOV claims that the requirement for the scanner to be integrated into the terminal body should be eliminated, thus allowing the scanner to be external, but this would not be in line with international best practices for lottery terminals, and Caixa's deadlines for delivering the terminals are not compatible with the current complexity of the electronic component supply chain (global shortage), which would again favor Deieblod/Procomp.
TECNOGOV requests that Caixa accept the objection and modify the description of the tender notice, "as defined during the public consultations held," and requests the republication of the tender notice with sufficient time of at least six months to allow the participation of the largest possible number of potential bidders, including "the possibility of verifying the contracting of the proposal that is truly advantageous for the public interest, within the legal framework."
The competition was to be held this Monday (7), but on Friday (4) Caixa informed about the postponement of the Electronic Auction, but has not yet responded to TECNOGOV's request for annulment.
