Ángeles Cruz Martínez
La Jornada Newspaper
Tuesday, January 21, 2025, p. 19
Biological and Reagent Laboratories of Mexico (Birmex) failed to comply with the commitment made to the companies participating in the consolidated purchase of medicines, healing materials and diagnostic aids because it did not receive requests for correction of the evaluations of the technical proposals, which left them out. of the contest.
Last Tuesday, the Undersecretary of Integration and Development of the Health Sector, Eduardo Clark, presented the schedule of actions, once that day Birmex had issued the ruling for the international electronic public bidding. He indicated that from January 14 to 20 the window to resolve the documentation and technical proposal
.
On January 21, new proposals would be received on the consolidated purchasing platform and from January 21 to 26, the evaluation of the corrected offers would be carried out.
Yesterday, through unofficial means, suppliers found out that they could enter the Electronic Government Public Information System (compraNet) the missing documents to participate in the possible allocations of the keys that were declared void; but they couldn’t do it.
Some companies with experience in public tenders commented that in reality the Procurement Law does not provide for the possibility of making corrections such as those mentioned, so It is possible that this option was raised due to ignorance
or the Health and Birmex authorities tried to waste our time and expire the legal deadline for filing complaints
before the internal control body (OIC).
This period ends today, as reported in the Birmex OIC and several suppliers have already delivered their resources, which has not been free of irregularities either, since the officials did not have an official seal of receipt of the documents and limited themselves to writing to hand the name of the agency, the date and a first name without a last name.
For their part, the staff of the internal body explained that they did not have the official seal due to the change from the Secretariat of Public Service to the Secretariat of Anti-Corruption and Good Government; however, it could be placed later.
They still have options
The businessmen consulted indicated that the disagreements will follow different paths: if the appeal is for a key that was awarded to a company because another was unfairly disqualified, the signing of the contract can be suspended.
In other cases, because 60 percent of the keys were declared void or there were no financial proposals (many were disqualified), contracts could probably be assigned once the complaints are resolved.
