Abstract |
To deliver public service effectively and efficiently, in addition to achieve value for money for taxpayers, governments of developed and developing countries alike spend a lot on goods and services. In Ghana, the Public Procurement plays a dominant role in the economic activities of the country. Public procurement accounts for about 14% of the country’s GDP. However, the area of procurement is increasingly prone to internal factors which subject the process to many flaws (Trionfetti, 2000). Even though ethics in public procurement has been recognized as one of the contributors to procurement failure, it has not been systematically studied before from the perspective of the factors that influence the ethical considerations in Ghana. The aim of this paper is to present an exploration to the ethical considerations in procurement management and establish their effects on procurement in Ghana’s public sector. By exploring ethical issues from Public sector, this could provide an ethical standpoint for the public project procurement life cycle and could preserve a good affiliation between the Public Sector and the service providers or customers. An extensive literature review was done to obtain secondary data on the subject which gave a good foundation on which the research work was made. The paper employed a case research design. A survey of the selected study population from the Accra Metropolis was carried out by the use of questionnaires through focus group discussions. The sample size of this research was estimated at 40 participants. The findings reveal the complexities of ethical considerations within the Public Procurement process in the country. It highlighted the differences in perceptions of what ethical considerations are; the importance of individual and organizational factors as well as the external factors which comprise the social, political and economic considerations. At the end of the study, it was revealed that ethical considerations in the Public Procurement system are of great significance to the Public Sector as the neglect of this considerations will, if not worsen, give way for increase in adverse ethical issues that will affect the Procurement Systems in the Public Institutions badly and possibly destroy the numerous efforts made for the introduction of the Public Procurement Act, Act 663 to sanitize the procurement system in the public sector. |