Grossly Overpriced?: Cebu City Hall audits barangay PC purchases

CEBU CITY — Suspicions of gross overpricing in purchases of personal computers (PCs) by barangays have sparked a city-wide audit by City Hall.

City auditor Jose Desamparado, believing the computer purchases were overpriced by up to 100 percent, has assigned three teams of auditors to check records of all computer purchases by the barangays.

The crackdown was sparked by the discovery of an overpriced computer purchased by Barangay Labangon.

Desamparado found out that Labangon officials purchased a Pentium III personal computer with accessories last year for P94,629 when they could be purchased for only P45,000.

He promptly ordered barangay chairman Felix Abella and other officials to pay back P49,006, representing the overprice, to the city government.

Councilor Jose Navarro, who sits in the city council representing the barangays, being the president of the Association of Barangay Councils, welcomed Desamparado’s move to look into the computer purchases of barangays.

Abella said members of Labangon’s barangay council agreed to buy the computer in question when Sangguniang Kabataan chairman Clint Ecleo presented the results of a canvass that showed that the P94,000 price offered by SD Software was the lowest bid.

Ecleo also presented price quotations from Fifth Marketing which offered P115,000 for a Pentium III computer, and Cebu Compu-Masters with an offer of P100,000.

However, None Bono Jr., president of Cebu Compu-Masters, went to see Desamparado the other day to deny having offered P100,000 for the computer.

It was later discovered that one of Bono’s employees submitted the overpriced quotation even if he was not authorized to do so.

Bono said he never allows any of his employees to make and submit quotations for a bidding process.

He himself admitted that the price quoted was too high, saying a Pentium III computer complete with accessories fetches only up to P52,000.

An expert on bidding procedures believes that Bono’s employee had been used by somebody to favor another bidder.

Desamparado said he was familiar with such activities, claiming to have encountered a similar situation when he was still the resident auditor of a government-owned corporation.

Abella said it should be Ecleo who must be made to return the disallowed or overpriced amount, and to do that he would not release Ecleo’s P10,000 monthly honorarium until after the amount is fully paid.

Almost all of the city’s barangays bought computers last year amid plans to course the collection of taxes through barangay treasurers.

But it was learned that some barangays bought computers at prices that seem incredibly high, some up to nearly P200,000 for a computer. — Freeman News Service