Bidding for repair, refurbishment of 81,000 PCOS machines fails

PCOS machine. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) on Tuesday declared a failure of bidding for the repair and refurbishment of the over 81,000 existing precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines.

“Nobody submitted a bid. Three companies bought bid documents but none of them submitted a bid. Under the rules, that’s equivalent to a failure of bidding,” said Comelec’s special bids and awards committee 2 (SBAC2) Chair Jubil Surmieda duringTuesday’s submission and opening of bids for the P2 billion project.

The three companies that purchased bid documents were Smartmatic – Total Information Management (TIM) Corporation, Indra Sistemas S.A., and Vertex Business Applications Inc.

The re-use of the 81,896 PCOS machines to be supplemented by the 23,000 Optical Mark Reader (OMR) units is one of the two options being eyed by the Comelec for the 2016 elections. The other option involves the use of all new OMR units — a combination of the 23,000 and the 70,977 OMR units.

With the failure of bidding, Surmieda said they would conduct a mandatory review of the project specs and other components before making a recommendation to the Comelec en banc.

Smartmatic-TIM said it decided not to participate in the public bidding for the PCOS refurbishment after the Comelec reduced last week the budget for the contract.

The original budget for the refurbishment project was P2.88 billion. But last June 23, the Comelec-SBAC2 announced that it was reducing the approved budget for the contract by P805,911,121 after the project’s component for the replacement of unrepairable PCOS units with new machines was removed.

“We reiterate our commitment to the Comelec and the Philippines that we are ready and willing to perform these refurbishments. It is important, however, that the right prices are considered and the herculean tasks to be performed are acknowledged and properly compensated,” said Smartmatic-TIM in a letter to SBAC2.

“As you can see from the overall description of the activities and parts involved in the refurbishment and upgrade of the existing PCOS machines, the new proposed budget of P11,141 per PCOS unit is completely unrealistic,” Smartmatic-TIM added.

Vertex, meanwhile, failed to meet the deadline set by the Comelec apparently because of the changes made in the budget for the contract.

“With the recent release by your office of the amendments and revisions issued, in our opinion, the set lead time for providing a meaningful and high quality proposal is too short, especially considering the scope and complexity of this project,” said Vertex.

“We, hereby, respectfully request permission to withdraw our bid from consideration due to limited time and other constraints to meet the expected requirements to comply with for the opening of bids,” it added.

Indra, on the other hand, did not submit any explanation for not participating in the bidding process.

Meanwhile, only two companies–Indra Sustemas SA and Smartmatic-TIM–submitted their bids for the 70,977 OMR units during the separate Submission and Opening of Bids conducted by the SBAC 1.

Dermalog Identification Systems GmbH earlier purchased bid documents but it did not submit a bid for the P7,867,298,140 project.  SFM