A Taipei-based US business group said yesterday that the impact of Taiwan signing the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) on business was still unclear.
The American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Taipei said in the latest edition of its monthly publication Topics that following Taiwan’s July 15 entry as the 41st member of the GPA, “multinational companies appear to remain somewhat skeptical about how much Taiwan’s GPA membership will in fact improve their market access.”
Besides the limited degree of English-language information being provided, another major concern is the limited amount of time allotted to prepare a bid — particularly when translation of documents is needed, the AmCham article said.
In particular, companies are given no more than 24 days to prepare a proposal, which the article says is already tight even when days are not lost because of US holidays.
TIMING
International bidders have requested that more time be allowed, as they need to gather documents and certificates from other governments to attest to their previous project experience and have the documents notarized, it said.
An AmCham member company in the engineering field reported another obstacle that prevented it from bidding in a recent infrastructure tender — a requirement that vendors prove that they have professionally licensed engineers on their staff from 12 different engineering disciplines, even though some of those specialties are totally unrelated to the project, AmCham said.
TALENT
The same requirement applies to local companies, but large domestic engineering companies usually employ a broad spectrum of talent, it said.
As such, whether or not the intention was discriminatory, the result was to keep foreign companies from competing for contracts, AmCham said.
“Due to these kinds of disadvantages, many multinational companies have yet to be convinced that Taiwan is abiding by the spirit as well as the letter of the GPA in opening up its procurement market,” AmCham said.
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