Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon has reconstituted the Department of Public Works and Highways Central Office Human Resource Merit Promotion and Selection Board (DPWH-COHRMPSV) as part of efforts to clean up the graft-ridden agency.
In an Oct. 30 order, Dizon appointed Undersecretary Ricardo Bernabe III to chair the reactivated unit.
Dizon had tasked the board to take charge of the judicious and objective selection of candidates for appointment to DPWH positions in accordance with the approved Merit Selection Plan that will feature a systematic assessment of the competence and qualifications of candidates for appointment.
Dizon previously said there were about 2,000 vacant plantilla positions nationwide that need filling up, and he wants to hire from within the DPWH rank-and-file and even among the job order (JO) pool.
‘We must lift up the deserving, honest, hardworking people here in DPWH – including job-order employees,’ Dizon said.
‘Being a JO for a long time does not mean you have no right or opportunity to move up. You will be first in line for the roughly 2,000 vacancies all over the country,’ he added.
The public works chief also announced the revival of the DPWH Cadet Engineering Program, first launched by then secretary Rogelio Singson in 2013, to attract fresh talent into government engineering ranks.
‘This is a big step to infuse fresh blood into DPWH – new engineers who’ve just passed the boards or are still starting their career as engineers to do it here in the department,’ Dizon said, noting the program will help strengthen project preparation, construction supervision, and maintenance across the agency’s regional and district offices.
In his Oct. 30 order, Dizon also directed the creation of a technical working group and secretariat from the DPWH’s Human Resource Management Division to help implement the systematized hiring and recruitment of competent and qualified people.
The DPWH COHRMPSB chairmanship had been left vacant with the acceptance of the courtesy resignation of former DPWH undersecretary for support services Marichu Palafox, who had chaired the unit during the time of former secretary Manuel Bonoan.
How to deal with tainted donations
Amid the continuing controversy of corruption in flood control projects, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) issued guidelines on how churches should deal with donations tainted with corruption.
‘The outright response of the Church must be to refuse donations, or to desist from soliciting donations from wrongdoing. When the goods are unjustly acquired – or if their origin is so publicly associated with sinful structures – the Church must act in a way that safeguard its witnesses to justice and holiness. She must be circumspect and diligent enough to scrutinize the source of any donation, especially if there is suspicion that it may have come from a morally compromised source,’ Libmanan, Camarines Sur Bishop Jose Rojas, CBCP-Episcopal Commission on the Doctrine of the Faith chairman said.
However, in instances when a donation or a benefit, that was appropriated in good faith, was belatedly discovered to have come from a crime or a misdeed, this is ‘retrospective complicity’ and the Church becomes morally implicated after the fact.
The Church can make a moral response such as returning promptly the donation to the rightful owners or victims, if they can be identified.
But if returning the donations directly to the original victims or rightful owners is impossible or impractical, there is an option to redirect the funds to causes of injustice or charity.