* By Francisco Camargo
With the entry into force of the AntecipaGov Platform, the Government meets the old recommendation of ABES and opens a market of 400 billion reais in public purchases for MSMEs
Since 2017, ABES has been sensitizing the Federal Government to the difficulties that micro and small companies encounter when selling to the government. In theory, they are privileged in bidding, through the so-called Draw Fictitious, but in practice, the main problem is not the price, but the financing of the sale to the buyer.
Like Anticipation (http://www.gov.br/compras/pt-br/antecipagov), which allows the financing of up to 70% of the contract, businesses, in fact, can compete on equal terms with large companies. A market estimated at 400 billion reais per year in public purchases in the federal, state and municipal governments opens.
Governments ask for payment terms that can be understood as 180 days or more and micro and small companies do not have enough working capital to finance their sales. Worse, they do not have any legal instrument, duplicate or invoice, which can be given as a guarantee or discounted by a financial institution to finance their working capital needs.
Duplicates are drawn against the buyer by the seller, as long as the transaction is carried out between private companies and can be discounted or assigned as collateral with financial institutions.
The drawee pays directly to the bank that discounted the duplicates, end of the transaction.
All financial institutions consider trade duplicates to be an excellent guarantee for the financing of companies' working capital.
If sales financing among companies is a very old and oiled process, for the government, this changes radically.
With + 75% of the membership of ABES made up of MSMEs, certainly the bulk of jobs in the sector and all startups, ABES has been working for almost three years for changes in the process that enable MSMEs to compete on an equal basis with large companies.
ABES has been recommending since 2017 that the Government allow the issuance, by MPMEs, of some legal instrument, assignable to be given as a guarantee or discount, that reflects the “commitment of the expense” or the “signed contract” with the government.
After some time of pilgrimage by ABES to make this proposal feasible, the team from the Special Secretariat for Productivity, Employment and Competitiveness listened and understood the scope of the demand, which was handled by the Deputy Secretariat for the Development of Industry, Commerce and Services, and it finally came through Normative Instruction No. 53 from the Management Secretariat of the Special Secretariat for Debureaucratization, Management and Digital Government of the Ministry of Economy.
As States and Municipalities can adhere, when it comes to federal funds we hope that the example will spread throughout Brazil.
It would be interesting that not only banks could register with the AntecipaGov system, but also all Aval Funds (State, Municipal and Private), FDICs and too much Finthecs .
With the improvement of the access of MSMEs to this government procurement market and serving the members, ABES, created the Public Procurement WG, to follow the evolution and collect suggestions that allow to improve the system.
* Francisco Camargo is an Engineer, resilient entrepreneur, founder of the distributor CLM Latam and Chairman of the Board of ABES
EN 
PT 
