Public Procurement Regulatory Authority has issued a formal rebuttal to media reports and internal accounts alleging malfunction and inefficiency in its digital procurement platform, the e-Pak Acquisition and Disposal System, asserting that the system remains fully operational across the federal government and three provinces despite a rise in procurement cancellations that critics have linked to platform shortcomings. The authority argued that recent media claims misrepresent procurement procedures and the legal framework governing public purchasing, pointing to 526,239 procurement transactions worth Pakistani Rupees 1.408 trillion processed through the system during fiscal year 2024-25, and noting that the platform currently has 10,235 procuring agencies and around 50,000 suppliers registered, including 732 foreign vendors.
On the question of rising cancellations, the authority clarified that cancellations are permitted under Rule 33 of the Public Procurement Rules 2004, which allows procuring agencies to reject all bids before acceptance, with the e-Pak Acquisition and Disposal System merely recording these decisions in real time to ensure transparency and traceability rather than causing them. The authority also confirmed that EPADS 2.0 has already been deployed within federal departments, with 14,511 vendors and 1,578 procuring agencies registered alongside thousands of procurements at various stages from planning to evaluation and award, with the nationwide rollout of EPADS 2.0 scheduled for July 2026, followed by planned integration of Open Contracting Data Standards in September 2026 and donor-funded procurement workflows in October 2026.
The official position, however, sits alongside a parallel set of concerns that have emerged from internal sources and earlier reporting. According to official sources, the Managing Director recently directed the Project Director of the Project Management Unit to submit a clear, phase-wise roadmap for developing missing system modules, an implicit acknowledgement of persistent implementation delays, while officials have also been tasked with reviewing the system’s core and analytical layers and coordinating with the Pakistan Digital Authority within a week to align on a national roadmap for integrating artificial intelligence into public procurement. The Project Management Unit has further been instructed to convert the EPADS 2.0 public dashboard into a functional executive dashboard and fast-track critical features such as direct contracting and force account. Multiple sources have also raised questions about the qualifications and effectiveness of certain consultants and senior officers, with capacity constraints cited as a factor weakening team performance and delivery.
The authority cited a World Bank assessment describing the e-Pak Acquisition and Disposal System as internationally compliant, secure, and suitable for multilateral development bank procurement standards, and noted that institutional reforms include the recruitment of specialists through competitive processes under approved service regulations alongside capacity-building programmes conducted in collaboration with the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization in Turin. With the nationwide rollout of EPADS 2.0 just two months away and multiple integration milestones scheduled through the remainder of 2026, the authority’s ability to resolve the implementation gaps identified internally while maintaining the operational continuity it publicly claims will be closely watched by the thousands of procuring agencies and vendors dependent on the platform for federal government purchasing.
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