Neri stops payments for CHED’s P300-M call center laboratory

Secretary Romulo Neri, temporary chairman of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), admitted that he is disappointed and seriously concerned over the agency’s P300-million call center laboratory development project.

In an interview last Friday, Neri said he had ordered a stop to any more payments to E-Services Global Solutions, Inc. (ESGS), the lead company making up the joint venture consortium that bagged the project.

“I have ordered that no more payments should be made on the project,” Neri said.

In an exclusive report earlier this week, The STAR revealed that early payments totaling almost P65 million were made by CHED to ESGS for the initial civil works for the Integrated Multi-Site Business Process Outsourcing Incubation Contact Centers (BPO-ICC) project.

Documents obtained by The STAR showed that in his final days as acting CHED chairman, Dr. Carlito Puno signed three disbursement vouchers worth a total of P45,046,949.92 payable to ESGS for supposed civil works it had accomplished.

The three disbursement checks signed by Puno were dated Aug. 2 for P18,012,213.66, Aug. 13 for P23,290,061.45, and Aug. 3 for P3,744,674.81.

Surprisingly, one of CHED’s four commissioners, Luningning Misuarez-Umar, during her brief stint as acting chairman last July during one of Puno’s absences, also signed a disbursement check in favor of ESGS for P19,876,434.21, also as initial payment for civil works under the same project.

All in all, the four disbursement checks issued by Puno and Umar amounted to P64,923,384.13.

Neri said that as former budget secretary, he was familiar with the P550-million fund released to CHED from which the agency took the P300-million fund for the call center lab project.

He was in fact the one who signed the special allotment release order (SARO) for P550 million in favor of CHED.

To his recollection, Neri said the P550 million was meant to be distributed widely among the more than 110 state universities and colleges for revenue generation projects.

“I released that money to CHED when I was in DBM because it was meant to be spread to all the different schools to help them come up with revenue generating projects and entrepreneurship-related projects so they will not depend too much on the national government for subsidies. That was our idea,” Neri said.

“I was surprised badly when I learned that it was concentrated on the call centers. That was not the idea. That was not the intent,” he added.