If you’ve ever responded to a Request for Proposal for a technical product, you know that the RFP often has mandatory criteria. If you don’t meet all of the mandatory requirements, you’re not going to win.
Unless you do.
I am not going to name the vendor who submitted this proposal for two reasons:
- The alleged corruption in this bid may not have affected the vendor in question, but the vendor’s in-country agents. And yes, I know you have to select your agents carefully, but sometimes it’s impossible for vendors to know what the agents are doing.
- As the article indicates, the vendor in question was not the only one to receive corruption allegations. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
Back to the bid, which was for an identity system in Nepal. At least two foreign companies bid on the system. The article describes the bid from one of those companies.
The technical sub-committee found that [THE VENDOR’S] bid for both packages failed to meet the required technical criteria. Specifically, in Package 1, [THE VENDOR] did not satisfy any of the 238 required technical specifications. In Package 2, the company fell short of 50 of 297 listed technical requirements.
Normally, if you meet exactly 0 out of 238 mandatory requirements, you don’t get an award.
Despite these findings, the evaluation committee overrode the technical sub-committee’s recommendations and allowed [THE VENDOR] to advance to the financial round. This directly contradicts Nepal’s Public Procurement Act, which mandates that only technically compliant bids may proceed. One member of the technical sub-committee withdrew his signature from the final evaluation report two weeks after it was submitted, indicating internal dissent within the department’s own review process.
The non-compliant vendor actually won the award…but there were a lot of questions. And action was subsequently taken.
The department’s latest procurement, a five-year contract worth approximately Rs 7.66 billion awarded to two…firms, triggered a prolonged legal and regulatory battle before culminating in the arrest of the department’s own director general on June 15, 2026.
Yes, arrest.
Specifically, of the Director General of the Department of Passports, Tirtha Raj Aryal, who also chaired the five-member evaluation committee that waived the technical non-compliance.
For the entire messy story, see here.
And remember that when a proposal evaluation process is thoroughly documented, shady evaluation decisions will be found out.
Bredemarket 