Read the spine print

From out of nowhere, lawmakers jumped upon some petty reports of anomalies at the National Printing Office—the eternally controversial NPO.

They even called for a full congressional inquiry.

Let us be serious: Did they think that the busy Congress would still have time to waste?

Behind those reports, if you read the fine print, at least according to talk in the printing industry, is simply the escalating rivalry among NPO officials.

Accusations flew left and right about alleged “bagmen” in the NPO supposedly handling the bribes.

Other reports talked about alleged rigged biddings for NPO contracts, peppered with rumors, too, about one NPO official and his expensive condo in Metro Manila.

Now the NPO happens to be under the Presidential Communication Operation Office, or the PCOO, headed by Communications Secretary Martin Andanar.

He actually never belonged to the close circles of the motorbike-riding Duterte Harley, such as the classmates, the dorm mates, and the original Davao gangs.

Andanar, nevertheless, was always well connected—politically and socially—even dating back to the Aquino (Part II) administration.

Anyway, among the big promises of Duterte Harley was that he would rid the government of corruption.

To the guys down here in my barangay, not much has really changed on the corruption issue in the past five months of Duterte Harley.

Really, Duterte Harley has yet to show the crooks in government the exit door, much less put them in jail.

Take the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), which the US government has been monitoring and which has yet to file a single case of big-time laundering.

And everybody in the banking industry knew how massive laundering took place in this country involving billions from jueteng and drugs and corruption.

Duterte Harley himself revealed that one family alone was able to launder some P5 billion without the powerful AMLC lifting a pinky.

From what I gathered, it was unlikely that Duterte Harley would try to revamp the AMLC, although appointees of the previous administration still manned the office.

At the NPO, anyway, corruption allegedly became deeply rooted because of the flaw in its own set-up as a monopoly.

Under the Marcos martial rule, it cornered all government printing jobs, although it never really had the capacity for such a role.

Subsequently, the NPO simply went into “subcontracting,” getting jobs from government offices, distributing them to private companies and simply collecting the “commissions”—whether on the table or under it.

Enter Republic Act 9184, or the Government Procurement Reform Act of 2003, which in effect ended the NPO monopoly. The law subsequently allowed the government to hire private printers.

Still, the rules of RA 9184 retained with the NPO the printing of “accountable forms, sensitive, high quality, or high volume printing requirements.”

But then again, NPO still did not have the equipment to fulfill the humongous printing needs of the government.

Under the Aquino (Part II) administration, therefore, the “subcontracting” beast at the NPO allegedly mutated into this monster called “leasing.”

The NPO did not have the equipment? No problem! It simply decided to rent the equipment of private printing companies.

Yeah, right.

It turned out that the leasing mania at the NPO became a leeway for officials to allegedly bend the rules.

But with the PCOO under Andanar, the NPO developed the spine for changes, Duterte-style, by stopping its questionable “leasing” contracts.

For the real solution for NPO would be to beef up its printing capacity. Period.

To prepare it for its own modern printing plants, Andanar first wanted NPO to obtain this certification known as ISO 9001:2015. That is the highly coveted QMS or the “quality management system,” which NPO wants to obtain by the end of 2018.

Unfortunately, somebody from Davao City, care of the Man Friday, supposedly stood in the way of the Andanar group in the NPO reforms.

That was all there was to the supposed anomalies really.