Aside from tapping the National Printing Office to procure 5 million license cards within 60 days last May, the DoTR confirmed that there will be more license cards that will be procured in the next two months, as it recently awarded the procurement to Banner Plastic Card Inc. last week. Banner Plastic Card is the contractor of Landbank’s Visa Debit card.

Once Banner Plastic Card receives a notice from DoTR, it is expected to deliver around 500,000 license cards by the end of July or the first week of August. Cards from Banner Plastic Card passed the pre-test of LTO’s IT provider Dermalog last June 16. With around 500,000 cards set to be produced, this should lessen the LTO’s backlog, which is currently at 690,000.

The awarding of the license cards to Banner Card was met with controversy: initially, the procurement was awarded to AllCard, which posted a bid of Php 177 million–lower than the Php 219 million that Banner Card offered. However, AllCard was disqualified after a post-qualification evaluation after it was revealed that it has delays over a project with the BSP, SSS, and Land Bank of the Philippines.

“Albeit, these delays did not amount to at least ten percent of the contract price, the same is tantamount to the unsatisfactory performance on its obligations under the contract,” the Technical Working Group stated in its report.