18.02.2015

UTI’s point of view regarding the erroneous presentation of the functionalities of the SEAP system and of the business activities of UTI in the online publication “Romania Curata”

To: Alianța pentru o Românie Curată
Mihai Goțiu, Editorial– Coordinator

Ref: Comments regarding our company in the article “SEAP transparentizează sau ascunde date esențiale ale contractelor din bani publici?” (Does SEAP render essential data of public agreements transparent or opaque?) “Cine este Urdăreanu, multimilionarul din spatele SEAP și ce multe alte afaceri au chiar firmele lui cu statul.”” (Who is Urdăreanu, the multi-millionaire behind SEAP and what other businesses his companies have with the state)

Regarding the way in which the authors of the above-mentioned articles chose to refer to the SEAP public acquisition system, to UTI and to Mr. Tiberiu Urdăreanu, UTI President, we would like to make the following statements:

We believe that a clean Romania should start from cleaning the way journalists understand to inform the public. If you have the honest intention of informing and not manipulating the public, the normal way to go would be to also request and present the official points of view of UTI, the system developer, and of the Ministry of the Informational Society, which is the institution that operates the public acquisition system SEAP. UTI is open to constantly communicate with the community and the media, and transparency is one of the fundamental values of our company. Therefore, this is our point of view regarding SEAP.

SEAP app was developed according to current national law in order to allow participants to public tenders (contracting authorities and bidders) to unfold specific activities and in order to provide public information for all those interested. The development of the SEAP, carried out by UTI, was based on detailed technical requirements made available by the Romanian Digital Agenda Agency, the acceptance of each functionality developed observing these specifications and involving a third party that certified the observance by the developer of the implemented operational and security requirements.

Also, the Romanian Digital Agenda Agency, as operator of the IT system, is the public law person ensuring technical support for application of the awarding procedures by electronic means, establishing the specific operational framework according to current public purchasing law.

The structure of data in SEAP starts from clear requirements regarding the inter-operability of national public acquisition systems within the European Union by means of the TED system, in which all public tenders in Romania are published. There are 19 different types of standardized documents through which the SEAP TED communication is carried out, including the form that sends corrections within the public tendering process. These corrections are generated by contracting authorities, not SEAP. SEAP only publishes these information to the stakeholders, after their approval by the National Public Acquisitions Regulation and Monitoring Authority. Therefore, a large number of public errata are not the responsibility of UTI, but that of contracting authorities.

The app interrogation interfaces have been conceived in order to allow SEAP users a fast identification of acquisition procedures they are interested in, the CPV being just one of the selection criteria. A simultaneous search for more CPV groups would not allow relevant results, considering that different CPV groups means different fields.

We would also like to state that SEAP has not been conceived as a reporting instrument providing analyses or statistics over public acquisitions in Romania. In order to support those interested in details on public acquisitions, SEAP data were made available by means of web services. Thus, a series of statistics can be generated by using the data sets on http://data.gov.ro/dataset/achizitii-publice-2007-2014, data periodically exported from SEAP. Other types of statistics which are not standard of predefined in the system are also available by means of the Digital Agenda Agency, as well as on http://data.gov.ro/. We would like to state that the data on http://data.gov.ro/ are available to the wide audience without authentication and without prior request to the institution hosting the site.

UTI does not have the obligation to provide technical support to those interested in accessing web services; we only carried this out in order to support those who wish to exploit the data and in order to give a better understanding of the phenomena in the field of public acquisition.

We would like to state that we do not have access to the SEAP database, we do not control or interfere in any way with the public purchasing process, our only interest being the proper operation of this IT system which, from its launch in 2014 and up to know has constantly been operating.

Regarding the comments related to the activity of UTI Grup, we would like to stress that UTI has not been awarded state contracts because of its quality of integrator of the SEAP system. UTI participates as bidder to the public tenders organized by SEAP, follows the same steps as any other bidder and waits for the result of the tender, communicated by the contracting authority. Some participations finish by awarding the agreement to UTI, and others don’t. Therefore, your comments that UTI has an advantage, due to SEAP, in the public tendering process are mere speculations.

Also, UTI has never hid the fact that it has contracts with state institutions, and we believe that these contracts were awarded because of the competences of UTI member companies. The businesses of UTI members have been and always are transparent, legal and, specifically because integrity is one of our fundamental values, UTI has made public these past five years all its accounting results, without having to.

We therefore believe you misinformed the public by publishing unverified, undocumented information. According to the journalism code of ethics, your obligation would have been to express your opinions on a factual basis, after having checked the information for data accuracy.

For these reasons, we hereby require you to return to the above-mentioned article and clarify the aspects we have mentioned above.

For purposes of correctly informing the public, we are open to respond to any media questions regarding UTI businesses – of course, if what we say is featured in your articles.