COMPLIANCE WITH SIERRA LEONE'S PUBLIC PROCUREMENT ACT AND REGULATIONS: A FOUNDATION FOR TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND EFFECTIVE SERVICE DELIVERY

Public procurement absorbs the largest discretionary share of Sierra Leone's public expenditure, and the degree to which procuring entities comply with the Public Procurement Act 2016 and the Public Procurement Regulations 2020 largely determines whether that expenditure delivers roads, drugs, textbooks, and services rather than leakage and waste. Successive reports of the Audit Service Sierra Leone continue to identify procurement breaches as among the most persistent categories of financial irregularity, with the 2024 Auditor-General's report recording aggregate irregularities exceeding NLe 243.9 million and non-compliance with contract terms described as prevalent across ministries, departments, and agencies. This article examines the state of procurement compliance in Sierra Leone as a foundation for transparency, accountability, and effective service delivery. It pursues four objectives: to map the legal and institutional architecture governing procurement compliance; to assess compliance behaviour across the procurement cycle from planning to contract closure; to diagnose the governance, capacity, procedural, integrity, and operational drivers of non-compliance; and to derive reform priorities from international good practice. The analysis is doctrinal and evaluative. It combines close reading of the Act, the Regulations, and National Public Procurement Authority instruments with evidence drawn from Auditor-General's reports (2018 to 2024), the Methodology for Assessing Procurement Systems (MAPS) assessment led by the World Bank, Anti-Corruption Commission reporting, and comparative literature on procurement reform in Africa and beyond. The article finds that Sierra Leone possesses a legal framework broadly aligned with international standards, yet compliance is undermined by weak planning, excessive resort to non-competitive methods, poor record-keeping, chronic payment delays, thin professional capacity, and enforcement that is sporadic rather than systematic. Transparency obligations are honoured unevenly, and accountability institutions are stronger at detection than at sanction. The article recommends completing the review of the 2016 Act, restoring the National Public Procurement Authority to a purely regulatory role, full deployment of the Salone electronic government procurement system with open contracting data, a professionalisation strategy for procurement staff, and credible, publicised enforcement of sanctions.

JEL: G14, D8, A4