A PARTY-LIST lawmaker on Thursday asked the House of Representatives to look into the P1.59-billion contract won by the US computer company Unisys for control of the civil-registry system of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
Party-list Rep. Carlos Isagani T. Zarate of Bayan Muna has filed House Resolution (HR) 592, urging the House Committee on Government Enterprises and Privatization to look into the deal that will be in effect for the next 12 years.
Zarate noted that the Civil Registry System-Information Technology Project Phase 2 (ITCP2) deal between the PSA and the US-based Unisys Corp. will be the second contract for Unisys, which also won control of the first phase of the project from the defunct National Statistics Office (NSO).
However, he said Unisys had committed gross violations of the contract provisions for the first phase of the project, as attested to by the Commission on Audit (COA) in its 2005 and 2015 reports.
Zarate warned that with Unisys having “unbridled control” of the civil-registry system, the US government can easily have undiminished access to all civil documents of more than 100 million Filipinos.
He said on October 3, Unisys executive Juan Ingersol Castro and PSA Director General Lisa Grace Bersales signed the concession agreement for Phase 2 of the Civil Registry System-Information Technology Project (CRS-ITP 2), under the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Program.
CRS-ITP 2 was still awarded to Unisys, despite the company’s contractual violations and failures during the project’s first phase, as reported by the COA in 2015, Zarate said.
“The recent deal, in sheer disregard of the said audit, still proceeded with Unisys given again full control of all civil-registry documents nationwide and the government getting a mere 45.5 percent of the revenues,” Zarate said, while Unisys secured the rest despite the original provision of the contract that calls for the government to have 58.7- percent share.
“The COA, in its audit, castigated both the PSA [then the National Statistics Office] and Unisys for violating the original contract. It was stipulated in the original 12-year contract [CY 2000-2012] that Unisys shall transfer operations and control of the civil-registry system to the PSA five years before the contract’s expiry in 2012, but Unisys did not abide. Perplexingly, the PSA did not even muster any initiative to take over controlling the civil-registry system, even failing to impose sanctions to Unisys despite the latter’s violation of its contractual obligations,” HR 592 said.
“This seeming intention of Unisys not to hand over the civil-registry system was already evident in the early years of the project when the COA, in its 2004 Sectoral Audit of the CRS-ITP 1, observed that Unisys had not trained the PSA personnel to operate the system. Moreover, the PSA has neither possession nor took part in the monitoring of records on actual purchases and inventory of items to be turned over to the PSA. In fact, this isolation of the PSA from the implementation of the NSO Serbilis Centers eventually led to the anomalous contract extension of Unisys,” the resolution added.
The same resolution stressed that “had the PSA taken over control of the country’s civil-registry system, the government would not have needed the rollout of CRS-ITP 2, thus saving government billions of pesos. Moreover, revenues would have been solely realized by the government.”
Even worse, Resolution 592 argued, “the PSA, with their failure to sanction Unisys, even allowed the latter to secure two contract extensions that ran from 2012 up to 2015, apparently with the go-signal of a ‘higher authority’. The PSA, in its reply to the COA, did not name who specifically that ‘higher authority’ was. Clearly, this project was so lopsided in favor of Unisys, evident with the fact that Unisys was even the sole bidder of the project.”
The resolution also argued that the COA itself had “raised apprehension over a foreign company having full and unbridled control over the country’s civil-registry system, as this would surely be compromising public interest and security. The COA, in its 2004 Sectoral Performance Audit of the Civil Registry System project, noted the government’s inadequacy of control to protect the interest of the government and the public.”
Zarate also raised the possibility that “having foreign companies Unisys and PriceWaterhouseCoopers [which shall supervise the project] control the country’s civil-registry system would permit them to collect and retrieve stockpile of information about Filipino citizens and share the same with their other clients, such as various branches of the US armed services and, possibly, US intelligence agencies. Unisys is in a rolling contract with the US government for ClearPath defense systems that support US Air Force logistics and operations, such as missions in Syria. What is more alarming is that the PSA could not even disclose safeguarding measures to monitor how troves of information would be kept and managed by these foreign companies.”
In conclusion, Resolution 592 said “it is imperative that the PSA finally take over the operations of the country’s civil-registry system, in compliance with the original contract and impose sanctions to Unisys for its violations therein.”