COA, in a report, questioned the credibility of the winning bidder, Sewing Solutions Inc.(SSI), to supply 12 units of high speed sewing machines worth P480,000 bought by the City Government of Bacolod sometime in January last year.
These were intended for women's livelihood programs in the city.
COA discovered that the 12 units high speed sewing machines were not used or operated and remained idle for almost a year now.
Six of the 12 units were also not in accordance with the model specifications per Purchase Order (PO) while items stipulated in the PO have no unit origin, brand, and some have no unit model to determine their actual specifications, COA said.
Deliveries were also discovered to be surplus or reconditioned and old stock units requiring step down transformers so they could be operated continuously without damaging the units.
There were also no brochures showing actual physical features and specifications and no individual certificates of warranty from the manufacturer.
The units and their motors were made up of different unit origin from Japan, China, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Cost of an equivalent brand new unit ranged from P17,000 to P31,340 per unit.
Spare parts of the units procured are no longer available in the market.
Moreover, in its observation report, COA said SSI submitted its legal documents only on April 5, 2006, or more than two months after the January 18, 2006 conduct of the public bidding, calling it as an "obvious" violation.
It also did not submit its 2005 Income Tax Return (ITR) to the City, the COA report added.
Worse, the technical and financial documents required in the pre-qualification of perspective bidders were not submitted, COA said.
Hence, the absence, incompleteness, or insufficiency of documents should have made SSI ineligible to participate in the particular procurement, COA explained.
Despite this, the City's Bids and Awards Committee awarded the contract to SSI.
Under Section 32.4 of the Implementing Rules and Regulations of the Government Procurement Reform Act, "Bid must be complete. Unless the instructions to bidders specifically allow partial bids, bids not addressing or providing all the required items in the bidding documents, including, where applicable, bill of quantities, shall be considered non-responsive and thus, automatically disqualified."
No one from City Hall would like to comment on the recent "scam".
