The Commission on Audit (COA) has discovered irregular the award of P654.6 million worth of housing projects for individuals displaced by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” to a contractor whose permit did not authorize it to take on such big-ticket projects.
In its 2017 yearly review report, the COA encouraged the National Housing Authority (NHA) to sue its failing officials and the still anonymous contractor of eight housing projects in the towns of Balangiga, Hernani and Quinapondan in Eastern Samar.
Auditors found that adjacent projects in the three sites were split into eight smaller contracts to “accommodate” the developer, whose Philippine Contractors Accreditation Board license approved it to secure construction deals worth as much as P100 million.
Had the contracts not been split, the total cost would have been P133.2 million for Balangiga, P286.6 million for Hernani and P234.7 million for Quinapondan.
For the COA, this implied the contractor surpassed its P100-million limit.
The COA said the NHA violated the Government Procurement Reform Act.
It also found that 10 Yolanda Permanent Housing Program projects, worth P852.7 million, progressed very slowly because the NHA granted contracts to a developer that had few workers and equipment.
The contractor—also not named in the report—ended up delaying the project.
The status reports showed showed that the contractor’s due date was extended 33 times, or a total of 2,761 days.
Regardless of this, the projects were not finished.
The COA said this was ground for end of the contract.
The NHA did as such for nine of the 10 contracts on Nov. 15, 2017.
But auditors questioned the NHA’s inability to gather damage payment from the contractor as punishment.
The NHA, in its reaction to the COA, admitted that the adequacy of the contractor’s manpower and equipment was “not fully monitored.”
It said it found the issues simply after the issuance of site memorandum reports that directed an increase in deployment of workers.
However, it included that it had been stricter in enforcing the manpower and equipment requirements as well as requests for expansion of due dates.
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