COA: DPWH spent P500,000 daily for car repairs

These vehicle repairs all add up to millions of pesos of taxpayers’ money spent — and the cost is rising.

The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) spent an average of P500,000 daily for vehicle repairs — even on holidays and weekends — for the entire 2001.

The Commission on Audit (COA) at the DPWH released the latest figures in the continuing investigation on the department’s vehicle repair anomaly, bringing the costs of 9,097 vehicle repair jobs up to P182 million from the previous estimate of P150 million.

The new COA figures indicate an average of 25 repair jobs daily costing P20,000 for each repair job — an amount conveniently less than the P25,000 limit imposed by law. Under the law, any contract entered into by the government costing P25,000 or more is subject to a public bidding.

"The repair jobs are, of course, not all anomalous, but 9,000 repairs are just too much for one year," a COA informant told The STAR.

The DPWH vouchers for these repair jobs revealed that many of the repairs made on the 500 DPWH vehicles involved in the scam were either fictitious, exorbitantly priced or repetitive, even to the point of absurdity.

As this developed, the COA national office effected a mild reshuffle Wednesday, removing long-time DPWH COA chief Manolo Sy. Sy was transferred to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and he was replaced by erstwhile Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) COA chief Adelina Ancahas.

Sy said the transfer was long overdue and that he is also too busy to attend to all the work swamping the DPWH-COA.

Sources inside DPWH-COA said Ancahas immediately ordered a reorganization of the office, which is literally swamped with mounds of documents.

The sheer volume of documents, case investigators said, is delaying the investigation. Case probers are also making a complete inventory of all DPWH vehicles to ensure that the motorpool is intact and its vehicles are actually being used for official DPWH business.

The DPWH-COA is also conducting a separate probe into reports that many DPWH vehicles, meant for use in infrastructure projects, wound up in the custody of DPWH officials who have no official need for them.

Sy said he has long made reports on the anomalous repair jobs, but added that these reports were limited to a few dozen vouchers. He also said he never realized the full extent of the department’s car repair anomaly.

Former DPWH motorpool chief Maximo Borje, one of those suspended in connection with the anomaly, confirmed that the number of repair vouchers began to surge sometime in 2000. Borje’s signature is on repair job vouchers totaling P63 million, the biggest amount in the scam.

Borje and 20 other DPWH personnel suspected of conspiring to commit the scam, may face the charge of plunder, which is punishable by death.