We shouldn’t be surprised of such corruption in government dealings. This is a very old system of corruption that still exists in all government level—municipal, city, provincial and national. Infrastructure projects is the main “source of income” of elected officials and the people in respective government agencies or offices (e.g. Budget, Treasurers, Municipal/ City/Provincial/District Engineers, COA, etc). Government officials involved in appropriating the budget, bidding and awarding the projects, executing and closing (paying the contractor) are benefitting from such system of corruption. Let us accept the reality that those people that ran in the last (and previous) election supposedly to serve the Filipino people have their own vested interests –to get rich or protect their businesses, if they have. At least majority of them. Based from previous government administrations, as far as I can recall, not one really tried to stop this “cancer of corruption” in Government infrastructure projects. Maybe some did but they were “eaten” by the system. This newly installed government is doing the same as previously installed administration by creating various commissions that investigates and recommends changes. I’m not saying it is wrong but what has been happening is that people are just being replaced but the system of corruption continues. There are always improvements that happen though but sad to say it is getting better on the wrong side. The process of how these anomalies are being done is getting better. Government agencies involved are making it hard to trace collusions by making necessary documents and requirements somehow satisfied all legal and procedural requirements (advertising the bids on time to unknown publications, filter out interested bidders to make sure that only bidders that will “cooperate” are involved, getting agreements among bidders that specific project will go to Contractor A and next project will go to B, bid amount already fixed even before bidding, etc).
Unfortunately, I can provide comments as long as I can but I really don’t know how to fix this too. One thing that this government can do, if some of them is really serious to start cleaning-up government corruption, is to put the right people in COA. If at least one government agency will be a truly guardian of people’s interests then that will be a good start. There will be challenges in making COA to really do what it should but the way I see it, this is the only government agency common in all level of government agencies involved in the process of infrastructure projects implementation.