Saudi Arabia’s Finance Ministry released on Sunday the first draft of the government’s tender and procurement regulations on its website, so that related parties can share their views and suggestions until Saturday 28 October.

The move comes as part of the Ministry’s efforts to regulate government procurement procedures, aiming to ensure equal opportunities and transparency in order to support local content and the Kingdom’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The draft includes mechanisms to identify the qualifications of the bidders and their ability to execute contracts and ensure quality outputs.

It also includes mechanisms needed to determine bid criteria (price related and non-price related) and to resolve disputes.

The new regulations will promote performance assessment and will tie the contractor’s level of performance to the fulfillment of payments due.

In addition, the new rules will adopt compensating the contractors if the prices of main materials see any change or the tariffs, fees or taxes were modified.

The Ministry stressed that the project was founded for developmental concepts that meet the needs of the concerned public and private sectors in line with the objectives of achieving the Kingdom Vision 2030.

The most significant of these changes is the establishment of a strategic procurement unit for the purpose of concluding framework agreements on the types, contracting and services that are often needed by more than one government agency to enable the parties to meet their needs at competitive prices.

The changes also include the establishment of a committee to determine the preference ratios for SME support and local content and encourage their participation in government competitions, the completion of competition procedures, the introduction of the concept of advance planning and the publication of plans annually through the unified portal, which contains a record of the projects and procurement of each government entity and the necessary information.