DR MARGARET SATYA ROSE
The Office of Procurement Regulation has designated this season (March 25th – April 24th) “Procurement Month 2026”, an invitation to recognise the growing importance of procurement to national development. This is welcome. Public procurement deserves the attention. However, if this season is to mean anything beyond training events and slogans, it should also prompt a more difficult reflection: what does it take to protect the people inside the system who are asked to uphold its integrity? With more and more reports of Named Procurement Officers (NPOs) being transferred or terminated, that question is now urgent.
If you have followed this series, you will know that these letters were never only about compliance. They were about the lived cost of ethical responsibility within institutions that do not always protect those who try to do the right thing. In the first letter, I addressed the abandonment many NPOs already feel. In the second, I argued for the art and discipline of informed refusal. In this final letter, I turn to the institutional infrastructure without which integrity remains exposed, fragile and too easily broken.
Across these three letters, I have been sharing elements of a wider discipline for NPOs, captured in the acronym P-O-W-E- with. “P” standing for Paper trail everything, “O” - Obtain written instructions, “W” -Wield statutory protections, “E” - Escalate strategically. This final article turns to the last letter “R”: Rally your network. That phrase may sound like the softest part of the framework. In truth, it is the most important. Because it forces a question that few have been willing to confront: rally what network, exactly? Where does the public procurement officer in Trinidad and Tobago turn for the kind of professional community and professional identity that the role now demands?
Here is the uncomfortable answer: the professional network you need has not been built for you.
Professional procurement networks
The professional association of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) has been formally recognised and promoted in Trinidad and Tobago by the Office of Procurement Regulation (OPR). Its qualifications are rigorous and take years for individuals to complete. However, CIPS itself describes its framework as one that “applies equally to both the public and private sectors.” The same is true of the Institute of Supply Management (ISM), the Procurement & Sourcing Institute of Asia (PASIA) and even the International Federation of Purchasing & Supply Management (IFPSM). They all make no material distinction between public and private procurement.
This may seem like a fine distinction. It is anything but. The Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property Act (PPDPPA) does not apply to private procurement for a reason. A corporate buyer who makes a poor purchasing decision may face commercial consequences. In the public sector, procurement decisions directly impact citizen wellbeing and the public interest.
Public procurement operates at the convergence of three forces that have no equivalent in the private sector: public power, public money, public purpose. That trifecta generates ethical obligations, legal exposures and accountability structures that are categorically different from those of a corporate buyer negotiating a supply contract. An NPO who fails to prevent a breach of the Act faces criminal liability under Section 61, carrying penalties of up to five million dollars and ten years imprisonment. The demands of publicness cannot be met by a discipline that does not recognise them.
When public procurement is treated as merely a variant of procurement in general, the specific burdens of publicness disappear from view. The training focuses on process, on sourcing strategy, on supplier management. These are necessary competencies. They are however inadequate for an officer who must navigate the intersection of the Exchequer and Audit Act, the Companies Act, the Integrity in Public Life Act and the PPDPPA, all while managing political pressure, institutional hierarchy, and the quiet expectation that compliance should never become inconvenient.
Consider, by contrast, what the United States understood over eight decades ago. In 1944, the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing (NIGP) in the US was established. Its mission, from the outset, has been dedicated exclusively to developing, supporting and promoting the public procurement profession. NIGP offers its own certification, the NIGP Certified Procurement Professional, designed specifically for the competencies and ethical demands of government purchasing.
The US did not leave their government procurement professionals to improvise their professional identity from frameworks designed for the private sector. They built dedicated infrastructure. And this was not merely a professional development decision, it was also reflective of the deeper, more strategic understanding of the “publicness” in government procurement. The US through its Buy American Act legislation since 1933 has made it clear that federal procurement will be ruled by the law, not the market.
In Trinidad and Tobago, the evidence of this infrastructure gap for NPOs is stark. The 2017 Cabinet decision approving a proper staffing structure for the procurement function was reversed in September 2023. The Whistleblower Protection Act 2024 remains un-proclaimed. Public officers holding CIPS qualifications are deployed in organisations and expected to make sense of the complex interplay of public obligations.
You are a public integrity professional
The NPO in 2026 must be understood as a public integrity professional. The NPO is not an employee who happens to have been assigned procurement duties. The NPO is a creature of statute. It is an office, created by the PPDPPA, and that office is an institutional mechanism with real power within the procurement system. Your task is not simply to keep a file, but to steward the conditions under which public decisions remain lawful, intelligible, fair and directed toward public value. Moral courage is a key dimension of the character of the public integrity professional: the steadiness to hold your institution to the standard the law requires of it. It demands the discipline to pause under pressure rather than comply on instinct, to examine your own assumptions before you act, and to hold a line with professional firmness rather than surrender or reactivity. This inner character is what distinguishes the public integrity professional from the procurement administrator. That said, the law placed authority in your hands and left you to discover alone what exercising it demands.
Rallying your network
This is the gap that the “R” in our POWER framework is designed to address. Rallying your network is not a social extra. It is the strategic intervention that makes integrity sustainable. In a fragile system, isolated acts of moral courage are easily exhausted. A lone officer may act bravely and still be worn down. What is needed is support architecture: colleagues who respect the record, supervisors who understand that documentation is governance, Accounting Officers who recognise that the NPO and AO stand within intersecting accountability regimes, and a wider community of practitioners who share the specific burdens and obligations of public procurement.
That architecture must also extend developmentally. Training calibrated to the distinct demands of public procurement, not merely procurement in general. Mentoring and expert guidance from competent advisors and officers who have navigated the pressures you face. Communities of practice where shared local knowledge becomes shared professional strength. A profession begins to take shape when its members can recognise one another, learn from one another, and build norms of practice that the system has so far failed to provide.
The PPDPPA is a collection of words on paper. The NPO is an important human mechanism through which those words become institutional reality. You may have come into this role as an administrator. The law has made you something more. If the NPO is crushed, captured, or resigned to going with the flow, the entire infrastructure of procurement governance becomes performative and without substance.
Every NPO who has held the line, documented carefully, asked the difficult question, or insisted that others put questionable instructions in writing, is providing the public integrity leadership their organisation requires and the law demands.
This series ends here, but the work does not. The P-O-W-E-R framework is one practical resource for the road ahead. And the community that should have existed from the beginning is now being built for the specific burden you carry, by people who understand it. No serious accountability regime should have left you to improvise integrity alone.
Dr Margaret Satya Rose is an attorney-at-law, head of Satya Juris Chambers and CEO of PC+ which has launched an Action Network for Named Procurement Officers and other Public Officers facing compliance challenges. Learn more: https://procurementcomplianceplus.com Email: mrose@procurementcomplianceplus.com
