For the second time, in less than a month, the government of São Paulo hired, without bidding, a new company, this time, Alura, whose platform will provide video classes and games to high school students in the São Paulo public network, for the amount of R$30.8 million, according to a report released this Wednesday (13) by Folha de São Paulo (FSP).
As a fulfillment of the promise of the then candidate, now governor of the state, Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans), the service was contracted by the incumbent from the Department of Education (Seduc-SP), Renato Feder, with the aim of including programming classes in the curriculum of all high schools in São Paul.
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In defense of the initiative, the Bandeirante Department of Education argues that “national legislation allows the exemption of bidding, if there is no competition between the company, given exclusive technical aspects, offered by the supplier in question".
No return – However, Seduc-SP failed to inform Folha about “the exclusive aspects offered by Alura”. When asked to provide a copy of the contract or the 'bidding ineligibility' process, the department failed to respond to the report in the São Paulo newspaper. When asked about the fairness of the procedure, Alura limited itself to stating that “the hiring process followed what is provided for by law”.
But this is not the first time that Seduc-SP has dispensed with the bidding rule for contracting services, in fact, the second, in less than a month. Previously, Feder had hired the company Bookwire to acquire 200 million digital books, but ended up giving up on the initiative, due to the negative repercussions of the choice of teaching materials. In its defense, the secretariat maintained that the termination with the Bookwire did not represent “damage to the Treasury”.
Alert activated – Even admitting that the legislation, in principle, allows contracting without bidding, specialists in Public Law assess that the high value relating to the contract signed by Seduc-SP would ‘ignite a warning’.
For the professor of public law at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), André Rosilho, “there has been recourse to the exemption from bidding with recurrence in hiring technology services, mainly in the educational area, under the argument that it is necessary to customize the tools for the sector public. We don’t know if this is the case with this contract, but it would be important to have more transparency about the decision process.”
Measure requires support – Faced with a contract for such a large amount, the professor of Administrative Law at Mackenzie, Alessandro Soares, understands that such a measure should have good support. “It is necessary to prove that the product purchased is so exclusive, so sui generis, that it is not offered by another company. A contract worth more than R$30 million, without a bidding process, needs to be transparent.”
According to the contract, Alura must provide digital games, video classes, content and activities in programming computers, through an 18-month contract, with an estimated 2.5 million accesses to the platform.
Teachers summoned – In recent weeks, teachers from all state schools in São Paulo have been 'invited' to participate in training courses to learn how to use the platform by students. Alura was responsible for managing an identical platform, with the same objective, with schools public schools in Paraná, when Feder, a technology entrepreneur, was Secretary of Education for the State.
