Bidding wart

Some things look ugly in the latest Comelec bidding for a P2.5-billion contract on the supply of some 23,000 new automated voting machines.

With the supply contract, the Comelec aimed to augment the 82,000 existing machines that it used in the elections in 2010 and 2013, thus unclogging thousands of voting precincts in densely populated areas.

Reports said the Comelec BAC—the bids and awards committee—had decided to disqualify all the bidders for the contract.

It so happened there were only two bidders, namely, Indra Sistemas S.A. and Smartmatic-TIM.

Indra is a Spanish company seemingly named after the Hindu god Indra, calling itself an IT and defense systems company, although it is also known to dabble in electoral technology as a relatively small portion of its total business.

Smartmatic is a company organized in the United States, claiming to have supplied electoral IT systems in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, Barbados, Panama, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Taiwan.

Smartmatic was also the supplier of the PCOS—the “precinct count optical scanning” machines used by the Comelec in the last two elections that became the target of unceasing claims of high-tech electoral fraud.

Anyway, with the Comelec BAC decision to disqualify all the bidders for the new contract, it seemed that the Comelec would have to declare a “failed” bidding.

Well and good, the Comelec could always call for another bidding, now that the competing bidders already had an idea of each other’s financial bids.

From what I gathered, the BAC decision had warts left and right, and front and back, and top and bottom.

For one, its reason seemed flimsy for disqualifying the infamous Smartmatic—the very target of renewed attacks in media with old recycled issues over the elections held five years ago.

The head of the BAC as chair happened to be a lawyer named Helen Aguila-Flores, with Jubil Surmieda as vice chair, and Charlie Yap, Maria Juana Valeza and Divina Blas-Perez as members.

The BAC disqualified Smartmatic, because—as the BAC resolution stated—“for having submitted a summary of its financial offer that does not contain certain items in the proposal.”

Taken on face value, the reason stated in the BAC resolution would indicate that Smartmatic was so stupid that it submitted an incomplete bid.

From what I gathered, it turned out that the BAC referred to the “summary” of the Smartmatic financial bid, which the BAC claimed to have blank spaces, thus ruling that the bid “did not contain certain items.”

The truth was that the “blank spaces” were the work of the BAC itself. You see, the BAC created an “abstract” of the bids, which was supposedly based on the bids of Smartmatic.

Our copy of the BAC abstract itself, truly, showed blank spaces in the bid of Smartmatic for items called other requirements, risk management and contingency planning, change management, and quality control and quality assurance.

Again—and this could be important—the abstract was the handiwork of the BAC itself.

From what I gathered, the lawyers of Smartmatic tried to point out to the BAC, plus the Comelec legal department and other units, that the BAC erred in leaving those spaces blank.

They claimed that the original financial bid of Smartmatic actually contained “dashes” in the items that the BAC showed to be “blank.”

Even the BAC acknowledged the existence of the “dashes” in the Smartmatic bid summary. Again—we are talking here only of the “summary” of the bid, and not the itemized voluminous financial bid.

Whadayano —for whatever ungodly reason—the BAC still did not remember to put the dashes in its “abstract.”

OK, the BAC members might have been forgetful. It was just that the bidders actually used digital bid forms supplied by the BAC itself, using the computer program Microsoft Excel.

Surprise, surprise—it so happened also that the bid form program would automatically convert a “zero” into a “dash.”

Never mind that the Government Procurement Policy Board (GPPB), tasked by law to be the police of government biddings, already ruled that a “dash” would be equal to “zero.”

Meaning, that the items in the bidding were offered for free to the government! And the Comelec BAC did not want those free items?

In fact, the GPPB already clarified the “dash-equals-zero” rule in several cases involving bidding for supplies in government offices, noting that the “dash” should signify the space in the bid document has been filled up—i.e., not incomplete.

Which the Comelec BAC claimed the Smartmatic bid to be!

And this gets even more interesting, because when the BAC members voted on the disqualification of Smartmatic, only one of them, Blas-Perez, voted that the Smartmatic did not violate the “fill out all the blanks” rule.

She noted that the Smartmatic bid showed that there were “zeros” in those very same items (the ones with “blank” spaces in the abstract fabricated by the BAC) in the detailed costing in the voluminous bid of the company.

The other four BAC members voted for the Smartmatic disqualification.

But wait a minute, because two of the members abstained in the voting for the disqualification of the other bidder, which was the Spanish firm Indra, namely, Valeza and Yap, who said they would take “no part” in the Indra issue.

Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that Indra actually submitted a hysterically comical bid.

The Comelec set a ceiling of a little more than P2.5 billion for the entire contract. The hilarious Indra submitted a bid for the “lease” portion that was one centavo—as in P0.01—less than the ceiling.
The Comelec ceiling applied on the combined bids for both  the lease and the purchase option parts of the contract.

Thus, the highly entertaining Indra should have submitted a bid of one centavo for the purchase option to stay within the ceiling. It did not. It submitted a bid of P1.18 billion, thus overshooting the ceiling by that much.

Apparently, the two BAC members who took “no part” in the voting on the Indra issue did not think that Indra was making a mockery of the entire bidding process.

On the other hand, the Smartmatic bid totaled P2.23 billion, which would have been some P275 million below the Comelec ceiling.