Electronic Procurement Procedures as a Mechanism for Improving Procurement Efficiency (Inquiry of Quotations)

State stability cannot be ensured without economic development. A key factor in the economic system is the public procurement process. The public procurement system acts as a fundamental factor in the socio-economic indicator of the country's development. This is due to the fact that the state is one of the key consumers in the market. To ensure its functioning, the state often acts as a customer, with the aim of acquiring goods, works, and services necessary to ensure state and municipal needs. The public procurement system is constantly changing; new adjustments and improvements are being introduced into it. However, at the same time, the system becomes more complex. Only from 2013 to 2018, 58 times of changes and additions were made to Federal Law No. 44-FZ. Since the beginning of 2019, an electronic procurement obligation has been introduced into the contract state system. In particular, quotes requests have now begun to be conducted using an electronic system. In this regard, it begs to conduct our own analysis in order to study the effectiveness of the implemented system. Thus, the aim of this work is to assess the impact of the transfer of a quotation request into an electronic form of conducting on the effectiveness of public procurement by the considered method of determining the contractor. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were set: 1. to study the legislation on the contract system, literature and other sources of information and determine the main features of the procurement by conducting a request for quotations, the advantages and disadvantages of procurement implemented in electronic form; 2. To formulate a research methodology that allows comparing the results of procurement by conducting a request for quotations in paper and electronic form; 3. To analyze the practice of procurement by conducting a request for quotations in paper and electronic form; 4. To formulate the findings of the study. In the course of the work, a research base was compiled. It included information on all requests for quotes conducted by the federal executive authorities in 2018-2019. Based on the results of the study, key indicators were analyzed by years. Such as the percentage of money saved (the difference between NMCC and the final price of the winner), the average number of quotes made, the number of submitted / accepted bids, the average value of failed purchases from the total number of purchases, as well as an analysis of the regions in which the procurement participants are registered. These indicators reflect the effectiveness of the transition to the electronic format of the request for quotes. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that the hypothesis that the electronic format allows to increase the level of competition was partially confirmed. It was further proved that switching to electronic format reduced the number of failed purchases. It was also confirmed that when conducting electronic requests for quotes, the percentage of budget savings increased. It should be noted that the results of the study can be characterized as initial, since they are limited by the sample of the study and require additional verification by expanding the sample. It seems necessary on an ongoing basis to evaluate the results of enforcement of changes in the legislation on the contract system to assess the success of the introduced norms. To date, such an assessment is not carried out, which may entail the risk of reducing the effectiveness of the functioning of the contract system in the procurement sector due to the use of inefficient tools.