Pakistan’s Public Procurement Regulatory Authority is facing mounting scrutiny over the performance of its flagship Electronic Procurement and Disposal System, known as EPADS, with rising procurement cancellations, incomplete system features, and concerns about internal capacity raising questions about whether the authority’s digital transformation ambitions are being matched by execution on the ground. 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 EPADS modules, an implicit acknowledgment of persistent implementation delays that have left several critical features of the system either absent or non-functional.
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, both of which remain unavailable on the current system. The directives point to a system that, despite processing significant transaction volumes since its rollout, has not yet delivered the full suite of capabilities that PPRA had committed to deploying, leaving procurement officials across the federal government working around functionality gaps that should have been resolved earlier in the implementation timeline.
In an apparent effort to build expertise, several PPRA officials, mostly contract-based consultants, recently attended e-procurement training at the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization in Italy, with the PPRA spokesperson confirming these officials would serve as certified master trainers and lead capacity-building initiatives domestically. However, sources question whether such measures can offset deeper structural weaknesses, with the Managing Director now asking participants to submit detailed reports for onward sharing with the Cabinet Division and the Prime Minister’s Office. The data further shows that 529 procurements are currently under evaluation with an estimated cost of Rs38.03 billion, while 3,123 letters of intent have been issued involving approximately Rs6 billion. Multiple sources have also raised concerns about the qualifications and effectiveness of some consultants and senior officers working on the system, with allegations that certain team members are unable to contribute effectively, weakening the overall performance of the unit tasked with delivering one of the government’s most significant digital governance platforms. For a system that processed over 526,000 procurement transactions valued at Rs1.41 trillion in the last financial year alone, the gaps now being exposed carry consequences that extend well beyond a single technology project.
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