CHED nixes consortium bid to collect additional P12 M for call center lab

Commission on Higher Education (CHED) acting chairman Romulo Neri rejected the bid of the four-company consortium which bagged the contract for the agency’s P300-million call center laboratory development project to collect payment of an additional P12 million for civil works and other services.

In a letter dated Oct. 17 to engineer Edgardo Bansale, authorized representative of E-Services Global Solutions Inc. (ESGS), said to be the lead company in the consortium with members Drishti Philippines Inc. (DPI), Information Transmission Computer Control Inc. (ITCC), and Hillmarc’s Construction Corp. (HCC), Neri reiterated his position that CHED will not be issuing additional payments to the consortium until a Commission on Audit (COA) review of the contract and bidding process undertaken by the CHED-Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) was completed.

“Although the Commission is aware that the contract and its antecedent processes enjoy the presumption of regularity of government transactions, there have reportedly been flaws in the process resulting in alleged divergence between what the Commission en banc had originally approved and the actual implementation by responsible Commission officials,” Neri said.

“There have likewise been questions and issues concerning compliance with the requirements of Republic Act 9184 in undertaking certain aspects of the project,” Neri said.

Neri had ordered an investigation into the project after receiving reports of supposedly numerous irregularities attending the contract.

The subsequent investigation by a technical and legal team had confirmed probable overpricing as well as serious irregularities in the bidding process conducted to award the contract to a lone bidder late last year.

In a 28-page report presented by Neri, the investigation found that the CHED-BAC - should have declared a failure of bidding upon pre-qualification of only one eligible bidder for the Integrated Multi-Site Business Process Outsourcing Incubation Contact Centers (BPO-ICC) project.  

“The BAC could have declared a failed bidding. There were grounds to do so. Given the magnitude of the project, it would have been prudent to do so,” the probe team said in their report.

Aside from the pre-qualification of only one group to participate in the public bidding, the investigators noted that the BAC could have considered the questions raised by its technical working group (TWG) on the eligibility documents submitted by most of the companies making up the ESGS consortium.

It noted that two members of the TWG had considered ESGS and DPI as having failed the eligibility evaluation due to the two firms’ non-submission or lack of financial records or experience in undertaking government contracts.

The probe team also noted that the BAC disregarded questions that surfaced regarding the qualification of ITCC in the post-qualification evaluation.

Documents obtained by The STAR showed that ITCC was found to be operating in a residential house and had no “physical office” during a TWG background inspection conducted on the four firms making up the consortium.

The investigation also found that the civil works costs of the construction of one single-floor building and the “retrofit” of five existing buildings to house six call center laboratories under the BPO-ICC project were “over-priced.”