Budget provision to ensure PMVIC inspection won’t be mandatory

MANILA, Philippines — A special provision will be inserted in the proposed P5.024-trillion national budget for 2022 to ensure that the government will not force to have their vehicles inspected prior to registration in private centers until there are enough of them in the country to provide good service, Sen. Grace Poe said yesterday.

Poe, who chairs the Senate committee on public services, said she will put in a provision that states that inspections by private motor vehicle inspection centers (PMVICs) will not be mandatory until there are sufficient number of credible and working sites to prevent overcrowding.

“The use of PMVICs for the registration of vehicles shall not be made compulsory. Vehicle owners shall also be allowed the option to have their vehicles tested at private emission testing centers (PETCs) for registration purposes,” the senator told dzBB.

“Now, if by some miracle there will be many PMVICs in the entire Philippines, then there will no such special provision in the next budget,” she said in Filipino.

She said the insertion of such a provision was necessary as the much-criticized program was ordered shelved by Malacañang, but the Land Transportation Office (LTO) has quietly issued memos ordering its regional offices to require inspections by PMVICs before vehicles are registered.

Another memo ordered that only trucks, tricycles and motorcycles are allowed to be inspected by PETCs but senators warned such vehicles are more likely to have less maintenance work on them.

Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade last week told senators during a hearing on his agency’s proposed budget that he ordered the scrapping of the directive following widespread outcry from motorists and local governments that there are not enough PMVICs that the mandatory inspections take days. There are provinces that only have one PMVIC.

Tugade said motorists will have a choice between PMVICs and PETCs. Their fees have also been made nearly the same.

Poe said there is no guarantee that the LTO won’t require PMVIC inspection again.

Lawmakers have also questioned the constitutionality and legality of the PMVICs as regulatory functions should not have been delegated to the private sector.

The accredition of PMVICs has also been marred by allegations of corruption and lack of transparency as some LTO and other government officials have ties or allegedly are owners of several such centers.

Poe expressed suspicions that the reason behind LTO’s insistence in making such inspections by PMVICs mandatory is to allow the owners –who apparently had first dibs in the agency’s privatization – to recover their investments.