State auditor speaks on reverse auction law

“Basically, if a county or a city is going to buy a dump truck or buy toilet paper, they have to now go online and have a reverse auction process so that vendors can say, ‘I’ll sell it for a thousand dollars,’ ‘no I’ll sell it for $950,’ until it gets to the lowest bid and that’s the winner,” Pickering said. “This is a brand-new expense for government that was created by the Mississippi legislature. We’ve never had to pay for these kinds of things before, and now the legislature’s mandate forces local governments now to have to pay for these new vendors, it’s a new level and a new layer of the whole state purchasing system.”