IF the government wants faster delivery of critical projects and equipment, a House deputy speaker on Wednesday said the Marcos administration must end the “pasa-buy” scheme in government purchases that has created two “mega parking lots” of funds.
Deputy Speaker and Batangas Rep. Ralph G. Recto said the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM) and Philippine International Trading Corp., an agency under the Department of Trade of Industry, are allegedly responsible for the slow procurement of goods at higher prices.
Recto issued the statement after noting the spate of Commission on Audit reports linking the PS-DBM to questionable transactions.
“When it comes to questionable procurement, two agencies are always starring in COA reports. This PS-DBM and PITC,” Recto said.
According to Recto, the two serve as state purchasing arms which other government agencies contract, for a fee, to buy a wide range of goods, including “planes, trains and automobiles.”
“There would have been no problem if the involvement of the two had led to faster procurement of quality goods at cheaper prices. But the opposite had happened,” he said.
As of August last year, Recto said, PS-DBM and PITC owed their client government agencies P63.1 billion worth—almost evenly split between the two—of undelivered goods, equipment and infrastructure.
In COA parlance, this amount represented “unutilized deposits and advance payments of government agencies,” Recto explained.
“Read the COA reports and cry. Some of the equipment were supposed have been delivered five years before but were still in the bidding stage,” he said.
The amount does not, however, include “delivery slippages of equipment and consumables used to fight the Covid pandemic which have been marred by allegations of irregularities,” Recto said.
The former senator added the two agencies “have become last minute dumping grounds of about-to-expire allotments of agencies.”
Because funding allotments expire at the end of the year, the lawmaker said, the two agencies serve as “sanctuaries, which extend the life of funds and prevent their return to the national treasury.”
Once an agency transfers the allotment for a particular project to PITC or PS-DBM, the funds are considered obligated, deemed spent even, he said.
This in turn creates the expenditure fiction that the funds have been utilized, when in fact they are not, Recto said. “This artificial spending inflates fund utilization.”
Ironically, Recto noted that it was upon the insistence of the Executive branch that Congress made appropriations “perishable beyond one year” in order to accelerate spending, “only to be circumvented in the other branch.”
Another issue Recto raised against the two agencies is the “patent lack of technical expertise to assess bids.”
Recto urged the Marcos administration to revert to the system of letting end-users conduct the bidding.
“Kung computers for teachers, then let DepEd handle the procurement. Kung military hardware, [give it to] DND (Department of National Defense),” Recto said.
It would also relieve the PS-DBM of the work of cleaning up the mess of other agencies, said Recto.
“In fairness to them, they did not solicit these accounts. These were dumped on them,” he added.