Barriers and Challenges for Public Procurement Integrity in Iraq: Systematic Review Study

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Public procurement is the most corrupt government activity. Process disintegration, limited competition, and corruption are the most common challenges in the procurement system. Thus, post-contracting project activities are contingent upon the effectiveness of the pre-contracting procurement process. This study examined the disintegration of the procurement process. It filled the gap related to the lack of comprehensive investigation in previous studies for identifying the barriers to procurement integrity. This research aimed to evaluate the procurement system's performance by examining the impediments to embedding novel frameworks and achieving the integration of the procurement process. The researchers conducted a systematic review and proposed a conceptual framework for common issues in the procurement system. Moreover, the study employed a focus group of eight experts to examine the framework's suitability for further studies in the public sector. The findings demonstrated ten thematic categories representing barriers to integrating multiple stages in the procurement system. The most frequent groups were fraud and corruption, accountability, lack of knowledge and skills, and lack of transparency. Due to the strict government conventional systems and regulations, this study emphasized clients' central position and limited role in facilitating team integration, adaptiveness, and upgrading the procurement system.