ChileCompra and transparency

The truth always comes out.

The case of Pablo Ortiz, former head of the technology division at Chilecompra, the Chilean government’s procurement portal, would be almost laughable if the matter weren’t so serious. Because Ortiz had to issue a reference letter for Sonda-Iconstruye so they could submit it in the Panamá Compra tender, a tender in which he himself appeared on the org chart of the competitors.

I mean. How clumsy can you be?! Did he think nobody would ever find out he was bidding in Panama?

The government is playing the whole thing down. Faced with criticism over this episode, it argues that these are attacks from Sonda, or that there’s no reason to doubt the process that awarded the contract to Vates.

The government has succeeded in keeping the problem low profile, because the story has barely been covered, even though a service as important as Chilecompra, which handles millions of dollars and should be a model of transparency, ought to be watched far more closely, by members of congress and by citizens.

Chilecompra has been questioned before over less than transparent practices. In fact, it is known that its executives accepted invitations from Microsoft to attend events abroad.

Is it right that Vates is still the vendor for ChileCompra 2.0? How is that project coming along? Will it be delivered on time? Have they given it the dedication it needs? Or have they given more time to the project in Panama?

(I don’t want to ask what happens with the intellectual property of Chilecompra, or of its implementation, because that looks really thorny to me. To what extent can what was built for Chilecompra be transferred straight to the Panamanian portal?)

Yes, it is outrageous that the government hands Chile’s vote on OOXML over to Microsoft, but nothing surprises me anymore, because things like what is going on at Chilecompra show that for a good while now there have been government officials who think more about their parallel careers than about protecting the interests of all of us Chileans, who pay their salaries.