SP City Hall maintains emergency health contracts – 11/30/2023 – Balance and Health

The City of São Paulo has maintained emergency contracts in the health sector for more than six years, despite irregularities already highlighted by the TCM (Court of Auditors of the Municipality). On Wednesday (29), the agency issued a new alert and ordered the administration to begin the bidding process to hire a new service provider within 15 working days.

Since 2016, the supply of food and enteral diets (via tube) to patients in 11 municipal public hospitals and two UPAs (Emergency Care Units) in the city has occurred through emergency contracts with third-party companies. The city hall even published bidding notices over the years, but they were all revoked due to technical errors.

The contracts currently in force were signed with three companies in 2017, during the administration of former mayor João Doria (at the time in the PSDB), and have already been extended on two occasions.

“The city hall has been adopting emergency hiring as a rule for implementing many public policies. This demonstrates a lack of predictability, legal uncertainty and what’s worse, from the perspective of city management, this demonstrates a lack of planning,” said Eduardo Tuma, president of the court of accounts, in the plenary session in which the councilors approved the alert to the Ricardo Nunes (MDB) management.

In the statement, TCM also warned the city hall about the possibility of holding public agents involved in the process accountable and forwarding the case to the MP-SP (Public Ministry of São Paulo) to investigate a possible crime of disobedience.

According to the court, the city hall requested deadline extensions throughout 2023 to correct errors in the notices. Technical tables were held by the body to point out corrections, but SMS (Municipal Health Department) still published notices with errors on September 29th and October 3rd.

When contacted by the report, SMS said that “all guidelines made by TCM were met and the tender was approved by the body”. The forecast is that the new notice for contracting the hospital nutrition service is scheduled for December 21st.

The contracts still in force had already been judged irregular last year by the TCM, which indicated prices higher than the reference values ​​used by the state and an increase of 25% in relation to previous emergency contracts.