The executive director of the Road Board has maintained that the agency did not dip its hands in the supposed anomalous transactions in the use of more than P1.66 billion in Motor Vehicle User’s Charge (MVUC), more known as the road user’s tax, which the Commission on Audit (COA) had uncovered.
Reacting to a COA report, Adolfo Escalona said the board had no direct participation in bidding out multimillion-peso infrastructure projects financed by the MVUC, which the Land Transportation Office (LTO) collects yearly from vehicle owners.
READ: COA bares anomalous use of P1.66-B road tax
As mandated by law, he said the board only “downloads” or allocates funds for road construction and maintenance projects submitted by 17 regional and 192 district offices of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
He said all the regional and district engineering offices have their own bids and awards committee (BAC) and technical working group which supervise the public bidding of infrastructure projects.
“There was nothing wrong in the COA report. But I just want to make it clear that the Road Board is not involved in the bidding process for the projects,” Escalona told the Inquirer in a mobile phone interview.
“The Road Board central office does not control or supervise the bidding for these projects,” he said.
He admitted that the board lacked personnel and resources to oversee all the infrastructure projects it had awarded to the implementing agencies, such as the DPWH field offices.
“We cannot monitor all of those projects because technically, we have no capacity and manpower to do that. What we only do is to monitor if the projects have been undertaken based on the required specifications,” he said.