Regional Procurement Group - October 2012

MacDonnells Law

Mal Skipworth and Eleanor Scott from MacDonnells Law provided an update on current Procurement Challenges (view here). As luck would have it the State Government released its proposed amendments to the Local Government Act 2009 the day prior to our meeting. Mal and Eleanor were able to discuss those amendments and how the proposed changes may affect Local Government procurement functions (see here for further information).

Although Mal's presentation covered a range of topics, the three topics which created the most discussion were:

• Should Procurement Thresholds include the GST value? It was acknowledged when considering Auditors and CMC it is generally safer to err on the side of caution and include the tax when making a threshold determination.

• The Case Study - see presentation.

• Valuable non-current asset contracts – Lease/Permits/Management Agreements. Mal advised where possible Management Agreements should be explored fully, prior to other arrangements.

Ipro Solutions

Grant Mackenzie's presentation focussed on the Ipro Solutions website for Contractor Compliance. Managing Contractor Compliance is becoming burdensome and critical to Council Operations as the amount of outsourcing of Services continues to expand. An example of this is the recent Brisbane Tunnel project where a Contractor cancelled a policy (thereby being uninsured) during his contract and did not advise the Principal Contractor.

In brief:

• The Ipro system is a Contractor funded site (no cost to Councils) with a minimum requirement of one hundred contractors. The system could be implemented through a central system, ie. FNQROC website similar to their "Harvey Norman" model which caters for different regions with different compliance requirements/suppliers.

• Utilising a council checklist/question-based compliance system, monitored by the IPRO system. Provides online verification, of such items as legal entity, ABN, ACN, trading names, financials, most licenses and insurances etc, directly from more than 470 third party databases.

• The system notifies both Council and Contractor when the Council specific accreditation, insurances or licences are about to expire, ie. 30 days prior. Unless new information is updated by the contractor on the date of expiration, the system will advise council and contractor of the expiry of required compliance.

Grant's presentation generated significant interest from the Procurement Committee and it was agreed that as a group, further research into available options which compliment Councils existing systems was warranted.