EDITORIAL - Finally, plastic license cards

It says a lot about the quality of governance and ease of doing business in this country that it takes forever just to obtain a plastic driver’s license card. At least there’s good news this Holy Week for motorists, after the Court of Appeals lifted an injunction issued by a Quezon City court on the delivery of over three million plastic cards needed for driver’s licenses.

The injunction was issued in August last year by Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 215 Judge Rafael Hipolito in response to a petition filed by AllCard Inc. The company lost the P240.12-million supply contract for the plastic cards to Banner Plastic Card Inc. AllCard went to court after it was disqualified from the bidding by a centralized bids committee of the Department of Transportation.

The DOTr and the Land Transportation Office reportedly noted allegations of delays in AllCard’s contracts with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Social Security System and Land Bank of the Philippines. AllCard complained that its P177-million offer for the supply deal was lower than the P219 million of Banner Plastic Card.

DOTr and LTO officials stressed that public interest must prevail in the controversy, as they noted the huge backlog in the delivery of plastic license cards. Banner Plastic Card had delivered nearly two million of the cards when the QC court issued the injunction. The backlog has since ballooned to 4.1 million. Addressing the backlog will take time as the LTO can issue only about 550,000 plastic cards every month. The LTO, which hopes to end the backlog by the middle of the year under a best-case scenario, is set to open bidding for the supply of over six million more plastic cards.

Filipinos have also had to endure long waits for plastic national identification cards, motor vehicle license plates and registration stickers. The delays have had negative consequences in other areas. The slow rollout of the national ID, for example, made accurate identity verification challenging for the registration of SIM cards. Delays in the release of license plates have allowed fake plates to proliferate, with some used for criminal activities.

Litigation and the slow pace of justice, corruption, poor planning and sheer inefficiency have been blamed for these problems. The controversy over plastic driver’s license cards is just one example of the glaring need for improvements in governance and public service.