On the'Eurispes.it, the article published by the Security Observatory, led by General Pasquale Preziosa and the two vip-presidents, Giovanni Russo and Roberto De Vita. The ideas offered to understand a current phenomenon that could undermine, from the deepest and endemic way, the security of the same state are very interesting.
According to Adam Smith, wealth serves, first of all, to increase the security levels of individual nations. As a nation's wealth level decreases, national security risk levels rise.
Faced with a vertical collapse of GDP and a deep recession, it is certain that the only instrument of containment is represented by the public hand through the Keynesian investment multiplier - any increase in the autonomous component of consumption or in investments generates an increase in income national five times higher than the initial increase.
However, alongside the public hand there operates an "invisible hand", not the Smithian one, but that of corruption, which does not multiply wealth but drains it, impoverishing, even more, the citizens and the State.
Corruption in the public administration is the primary cause of the degeneration of a country's ethical behavior and the inefficient use of public financial resources.
Mafia infiltrations in state bureaucracy and, more generally, in the public works procurement system is still a national problem for our country, despite the great judicial work done and underway.
The phenomenon of corruption and that of organized crime often find the point of welding in the execution of public works contracts.
A careful analysis of the procedures in use by the PA must be carried out: the identification of possible remedies appears indispensable to "ensure the good performance and impartiality of the administration" (Const. Art. 97).
The topic is vast and the profiles on which to intervene are manifold.
Below is a first series of reflections. The essential points of the public works contract, under current legislation, can be summarized as follows:
- the planning;
- the tender notice of the PA;
- the offer of proposers;
- the requirements of the bidders and the methods of verifying the best offer;
- execution of the works and their compliance with the rule of art;
- variations in progress;
- contractor's reservations;
- final quality of the work;
- realization times.
The main problems encountered during the tender or in the execution of public contracts can be summarized as follows:
- poor quality design;
- the variations during construction, in the majority of cases, lead to a constant and abnormal rise in costs, often supported by specious or shaky if not contrived reasons;
- the payment of the work progress reports (SAL), which do not always correspond to the actual progress of the work;
- the contractor's reservations which often make the relationship with the client difficult;
- the prevailing award criterion, based on the most economically advantageous tender, presupposes a high technical level of the contracting commission which the administrations are not always able to guarantee;
- the winner of the tender is entitled to an advance of 10% before starting work; acquires other funding from the PA during construction based on progress; acquires additional financing for variants during construction. Only 10% of the cost of the work constitutes a guarantee balance for the State.
The variations in progress constitute the weak links of the system, in that they impose design modifications whose costs can greatly unbalance the economic and financial stability of the work in its entirety and, often, hide the surcharge of corruption.
Through these variants, the total costs of the infrastructures can rise dramatically and the examples of public works with costs that have risen a lot over time are unfortunately numerous.
Starting a public work whose costs - due to the variations in progress - are only indicative and, almost always, determined by default, means undermining, in terms of cost-effectiveness and effectiveness, any form of state planning, with very negative effects on National Security.
The payment of the balance of the work at the outcome of the test of 10% does not seem to constitute a sufficient guarantee for the success of the contract, because it is marginal compared to the amounts received by the company for the variations in progress.
The public works contract, in accordance with current legislation, therefore does not guarantee the requirements provided for by the rules on the correct administrative procedure at least in terms of economic efficiency and effectiveness (the other elements are impartiality, publicity and transparency).
In view of the current recession and the necessary economic revitalization of the country, it is urgent for the PA to identify new effective rules for infrastructure planning, to restore vigor to the economy and to unburocratize the system of public works contracts.
The principles of economy and efficiency can only be implemented if the new rules are simple, linear and valid.
The premise of the new rules must be punctuality of the PA in the balance of the price of the works, when accepted. The current slowness of the PA in paying debts - around 30 billion euros - towards private individuals is deleterious for the country's economy and for businesses.
The administration that has an interest in creating a public work will publicly disclose the needs and accept the market offers.
The project finance tool should be preferred, where possible, because this case empowers the contractor for the quickest conclusion of the work.
In addition, special attention should be paid to the verification of business requirements (curricula adequate and healthy) and economic-financial aspects of economic operators.
The works must follow the rules of the art and delivery times - except in cases of force majeure - under penalty of forfeiture of the contract.
These simple rules would make it possible to start a process aimed at restoring identity and role to the PA which would assume the true function of the contractual counterparty of the companies.
But above all, we would go to give dignity and value to those companies that have a history of ability, solidity and morality behind them.
The most important aspect will concern National Security, which will benefit from a more efficient use of financial resources to be allocated to effective preventive control and verification systems. ex post, mitigating, on the downside, the levels of risk both for corruption and for infiltrations of organized crime.
The PA would relieve a large part of the bureaucratic burdens of carrying out the public works contract, limiting itself to establishing only the key points of the requirements required for the work such as, for example, the material and temporal correspondence of the artifact to what was established.
Any responsibility and burden for the execution of the work would fall solely and exclusively on the company to which, therefore, historical requirements of capacity, solidity and morality are required.
This would create a new public-private trust relationship for the country's infrastructural relaunch, with the aim of ensuring that what the public hand will give is not stolen from the invisible hand of corruption and organized crime.