COVID Suppliers Business Integrity Screening

The COVID-19 global pandemic was a watershed moment for numerous reasons including its implications on global public health as well as the interconnectedness of economies globally. Even as the pandemic tapers off, the effects, experiences and lessons pertaining to the pandemic response lingers on. Seemingly, COVID-19 created ‘winners and losers’; for instance, Oxfam International purports that the world’s richest doubled their net worth during the two years of the pandemic1. Further various media reports revealed that COVID stimuli and or social funds did not reach the intended beneficiaries in a number of countries and jurisdictions2.
For Transparency international (TI), including TI Zambia, the COVID pandemic revealed a number of corruption vulnerabilities and risks pertaining to, but not limited to, public procurement, identification criteria of beneficiaries of COVID social protection funds and management of those funds. It is against this background that TI Zambia undertook a business integrity screening assessment, as part of the Adaptive Risk-Based Approaches to Anti-Corruption in COVID 19 project. The purpose of the integrity screening was to interrogate the integrity of businesses that were awarded significant contracts by government ministries during the COVID-19 response in Zambia. This is because the audit reports on COVID published by the Office of the Auditor General (OAG)3 in Zambia and TI Zambia’s COVID Risks maps4 revealed irregularities in procurement processes, including in the manner in which businesses where selected for bids, the type of bidding/selection processes used and the way in which contracts were managed, among others.
Cognizant of the juxtaposition between due diligence in public procurement and the urgent nature of the emergency response, the business integrity assessment seeks to shade some light on some of the businesses that participated in public procurement related to the COVID-19 response. This was done with the objective of ascertaining corruption red flags pertaining to the businesses awarded COVID public tenders so as to generate evidence to inform advocacy interventions aimed at contributing to strengthening public procurement systems and anti-corruption.