Strengthening Qualification and Bidder Selection for Public Construction Contracts, Safety Evaluation Enhanced

[Asia Economy Reporter Jang Sehee] Safety evaluations will be strengthened at the stages of bidding participation and successful bidder selection for public construction contracts.

On the 11th, the Ministry of Economy and Finance held the Public Procurement System Improvement Committee, a public-private joint committee chaired by Deputy Minister Ando Geol, to review and approve measures to improve the national contract system aimed at strengthening safety management and reducing the burden on small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as plans to introduce a pilot special exception system for national contracts.

First, the safety items, which were previously evaluated as additional credibility points in the pre-qualification (PQ) for bidding participation, will be converted into regular scoring items, and a pilot project targeting public enterprises will be conducted.

The comprehensive evaluation bidding system for construction projects will expand the scoring range for construction safety evaluations. Points will be added or deducted for all companies based on the industry average accident fatality rate.

Following the Gwangju building collapse accident, the bidding participation restriction period for illegal subcontractors and primary contractors will be extended up to two years.

Reflecting the investigation and recommendations of the Special Labor Safety Investigation Committee (Special Committee) after the late Kim Yong-gyun’s accident, the power generation industry will contract labor costs based on actual deployed personnel and executed wages, and the ordering agency will inspect the actual executed wages, taking measures such as reducing the contract amount if wages are not executed.

To reduce the burden on companies, the committee decided to change the criteria for selecting the successful bidder in the event of a tie in the comprehensive evaluation bidding system from the current 'lowest bid price' to 'closest to the balanced price.' The balanced price is calculated by excluding the top 20% and bottom 20% of bid amounts and taking the arithmetic average of the remaining bids.

This improved criterion will first be implemented in the simplified comprehensive evaluation bidding system for construction costs between 10 billion and 30 billion KRW, and for projects over 30 billion KRW, it will be piloted this year and next year, with full implementation planned from 2023.

The committee also decided to introduce and pilot operate a national contract pilot special exception system to support innovative products.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.