A LEGISLATOR on Sunday asked the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) why it allowed the US company Unisys to win the P1.59-billion contract for the computerization of the civil registry system when it was the sole bidder.
Party-list Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate of Bayan Muna, a lawyer, explained that a sole bidder is a contradiction in terms since a single company cannot compete against itself but the PSA declared it as the sole complying bidder.
Zarate also questioned PSA about its failure to discipline Unisys, which had failed to comply with the original contract provisions for 12 years.
The Civil Registry System-Information Technology Project Phase 2 (ITCP2) deal between the PSA and Unisys Corp. will be the second contract for the company, which also controlled the first phase of the project under the defunct National Statistics Office (NSO).
Earlier, Zarate filed Resolution 592 asking the House of Representatives to inquire into the P1.59-billion contract and urging the House Committee on Government Enterprises and Privatization to look into the deal, which will be in effect for the next 12 years.
Resolution 592 said “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 Commission on Audit [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 to public interest and security. The COA, in its 2004 Sectoral Performance Audit of the Civil Registry System project, noted the government’s inadequacy of controls to protect the interest of the government and the public.”
It also raised the possibility that “having foreign companies Unisys and PriceWaterhouseCoopers [who 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.
“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,” Zarate said.
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.” The resolution also noted that Unisys had committed gross violations of the contract provisions for the first phase of the project, and this was confirmed by the 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 under the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Program.
“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 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 NSO] 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,” Resolution 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 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.”