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Pimentel Questions LTO for Its P3.15-B Deal With Unreliable Service Providers

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III wants the Land Transportation Office (LTO) to explain why it paid Php 3.15 billion to IT service providers for a faulty online licensing and registration portal.

Pimentel Questions LTO for Its P3.15-B Deal With Unreliable Service Providers

According to Senator Pimentel, LTO has fully paid four IT companies despite an “incomplete turnover of deliverables,” which is a  “clear violation of the procurement and auditing rules and to the disadvantage and detriment of our government and country as a whole.” This is because, under the country’s procurement laws, no payment is supposed to be made for services not yet rendered or for supplies and materials not yet delivered under any contract with the government.

“Unsurprisingly, there have been complaints of slow processing of documents in getting a driver’s license and its renewal, as well as registration of vehicles, which have been attributed to its new IT system,” the senator said.

He added that even the new LTO chief Teofilo Guadiz III has acknowledged that the glitches in the land transportation management system (LTMS) are causing “massive delays in LTO transactions nationwide.”

In fact, driver’s license application and motor vehicle registration now take five days. They used to have a  turnaround time of only two hours, according to Pimentel.

“It is thus imperative for the LTO to explain why full payment has been made to the vendor of this IT system which has unresolved issues and are clearly not working as intended and is causing massive disruptions to the LTO processes,” Pimentel said.

And so, the senator has called on the Senate blue ribbon committee to look into these allegedly questionable payments made by LTO to four IT companies: Dermalog Identification System, Holy Family Printing Corp., Microgenesis, and Verzontal Builders.

 

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