More than 6,000 corporations have lost their Philippine Government Electronic Procurement System (PhilGEPS) Platinum registration after failing to submit their beneficial ownership documents, according to the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM).
With almost half of the firms unable to file such documents, PS-DBM executive director Genmaries Entredicho-Caong said that non-submission of ownership documents automatically suspends a company’s registration.
‘This ensures that only bidders with declared beneficial owners can participate in government bidding and those beneficial owners must have no conflict of interest with the procuring entity or with other participating bidders,’ the procurement service chief said.
She reported that out of the 12,769 corporations registered under PhilGEPS Platinum this year, only 6,766 have submitted their beneficial ownership documents as required by the PS-DBM.
This means that 6,003 firms, representing about 47 percent of all PhilGEPS Platinum-registered corporations this year, have failed to comply with the required submission.
‘The non-submission of this document automatically suspends their platinum registration, which is the only eligibility document required from bidders,’ Entredicho-Caong said.
In compliance with the provisions of the National Government Procurement Act (NGPA), the procurement service requires all bidders seeking PhilGEPS Platinum registration to submit beneficial ownership information as part of their eligibility documents for public procurement.
Further, the Government Procurement Policy Board-Technical Support Office (GPPB-TSO) found that 65.8 percent of government project bidders have common owners based on a random sampling of 180 procuring entities.
‘We found out that 71.6 percent of bidders were related to government officials. With the disclosure of beneficial ownership in place, we can deter unfair competition in public contracts and improve our services to benefit our citizens,’ GPPB-TSO officer-in-charge Maria Dionesia Rivera-Guillermo said.
Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman said the disclosure of beneficial ownership is a key provision of the new law, aimed at preventing conflicts of interest in public procurement and curbing corruption and collusion in government bidding.
‘Under the NGPA, the old schemes of name-swapping, figurehead changes and dummy company owners will no longer work,’ she said.