Dirty money in the cement

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO
March L. Fianza

After the smoke in the battle for House Speaker has thinned, President Duterte updated a familiar uproar involving the Dept. of Public Works and Highways saying corruption in that department remains widespread.
    Apparently, that was at the back of his mind for a while and had the nerve to turn it into a statement last week as Congress started its special session to deliberate on the P4.5 trillion national budget for 2021.
    Exactly, he knew what he was talking about because of experience as he said that “corruption is embedded in the projects of the DPWH.” Although he claimed he just did not know who was involved – a quick decision indeed, because he had the feeling that someone might ask him to name names.
    The President said there are so many officials lined up in the bureaucratic maze so that he does not know who they are, but added that contractors “were scheming with the DPWH” to carry out corrupt practices.
    With that, he might form a team to probe what he alleged as widespread corruption in the DPWH even while Sec. Mark Villar earlier last week already created a task force made up of five officials to investigate fellow executives.
    Villar’s task force however is doubtful if it would ever move, much less succeed because the team cannot come up with an honest to goodness report since it will be investigating a circle where they belong to.
    A day after those statements were made, Senator Panfilo said it was timely for the President to raise corruption at the DPWH knowing the fact that contractors openly talk behind the backs of DPWH officials “using descriptions too degrading to even mention,” Lacson said.
    The senator said, it is now an open secret that commissions or kickbacks have become the rule rather than the exception in the implementation of public works projects involving not only some corrupt officials of DPWH but many lawmakers too.
    Read this and cry. The President in his own words said, “The project engineers, road right-of-way, corruption there is massive. There’s no construction that will start without transactions made”.
    Lately, the President’s actions gave me suspicions why he makes such proclamations. His timing came after the change of speakership in Congress and as the lawmakers were about to pass the general appropriations bill (GAB).
    With such claims of corruption in the DPWH involving many, he was insinuating that the lawmakers should not use the government projects funded through the national budget bill to hide their spoils.
    That is the pork barrel that has not been eliminated despite the Supreme Court decision that prohibited it. For as long as district congressmen, Benguet included, are allowed to identify projects for inclusion in the National Expenditure Program, there will always be pork in the national budget.
    If a congressman succeeds in inserting an amount for a project in the NEP, the contractor will reward him for his identification work. The project amount has already been padded to contain the lawmaker’s share.
    The Supreme Court in so many instances declared as unconstitutional the practice of Congressmen in “participating in the areas of project identification, modification and revision of project identification, fund release and fund realignment.”
Indeed, in every GAB, dirty money is mixed in the cement, and nobody knows except the engineer, the contractor and the politician. I repeat what President Duterte said, “There is no construction that will start without transactions made”.
    This illegal relationship also violates Section 9 of RA 3019, or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act which prohibits public officials from “directly or indirectly requesting or receiving any gift, present, share, percentage or benefit, for himself or for any other person, in connection with any contract or transaction between the government and any other part.”
    For DPWH, Sec. Villar whom President Duterte described as “straight and incorruptible because he is already rich,” said he will take the challenge of the President and continue to fight harder to stop corruption.
    He sounded sincere but at the same time I thought I was listening to a broken record about the words of promise often repeated by officials in the past. He said his office has already introduced “reforms to weed out corruption” but let us see.
    As Duterte and Lacson were hitting at their co-officials, the Commission on Audit joined the chorus and came up with a report that 2,411 DPWH projects from 2015-2019 amounting to P101.690 billion were not completed on time or unimplemented - a clear violation of RA 9184 or the Government Procurement Reform Act.
    To make the situation worse, the DPWH according to the COA, did not terminate the contracts nor impose liquidated damages to the contractors after the delays exceeded the allowable 10 percent of the original or revised contract time of 54 projects with contract amounts totaling P607.811 million.
    Delays in the implementation of the projects as cited in the COA report were caused by suspension orders, time extensions, and variation orders issued by the concerned DPWH offices.
    The DPWH orders were based on many factors such bad weather, peace and order, road right-of-way, modification of plans, design and programs of work, realignment of location, pending issuance of clearance from LGUs, permits for cutting trees from DENR, insufficient workforce, lack of equipment, scarcity of local materials, inaccessible project site, etc., etc.
    All these however were the failure of DPWH consultants and management to consider during the preliminary engineering study on the viability of the projects, the COA noted in its report.        
    By the way, the COA should investigate the DTI-DPWH convergence project in 2019 worth P25 million (P10M, P10M plus P5M) that should have been implemented at Nawal-Tickey-Daclan roadline in Bokod, Benguet but was instead transferred to another roadline.
    So far, the best move that COA can do for now is to ask the DPWH to blacklist those who will refuse to take the necessary corrections, in addition to issuing suspension notices or issuing notices of disallowance over the projects if the DPWH fails to require the concerned contractors to rectify the defects.