DepEd to look closely at Senate recommendations on procurement -spokesperson

The Department of Education will “look closely” into the recommendations of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee in a bid to strengthen its procurement process after the alleged purchase of overpriced laptops in 2021, DepEd Spokesperson Michael Poa said Friday.

“Tayo naman po sa DepEd syempre po we will look closely into the recommendations and see if there are things that we still have to adopt para po lalo nating mapalakas ang procurement process natin sa DepEd,” Poa said in an interview on dzBB.

He said the department would also cooperate and provide the necessary documentation should the Office of the Ombudsman pursue criminal and administrative charges against former and current DepEd officials.

On the Senate Blue Ribbon panel’s recommendation of administrative charges, Poa said they were waiting on a parallel investigation that the DepEd was currently conducting.

The investigation would be completed in 10 to 20 days.

Asked about Vice President and concurrent Education Secretary Sara Duterte’s reaction to the Senate Blue Ribbon report, Poa said, “Ang ating Vice President [and] Secretary of Education, talagang ang gusto niya ay tingnan ang ating procurement. So pagdating naman po don sa mga kaso na ifa-file that is a personal liability on the officials' part. Di naman po apektado ang DepEd,” Poa said.

(Our Vice President and Secretary of Education, she does want to look into our procurement process. When it comes to the cases to be filed, that is a personal liability on the officials' part. That does not affect the DepEd.)

For DepEd, Poa said the important thing was to establish proper controls to remove questions and doubts in their procurement process regardless of what happened in the past.

On Thursday, the Senate Blue Ribbon committee recommended graft and perjury charges against former and current DepEd and Department of Budget and Management Procurement Service (PS-DBM) officials over the laptop procurement project in 2021.

Further, the Senate panel found that the contract for the supply and delivery of laptop computers for public school teachers was overpriced by at least P979 million and recommended the recovery of the amount, which would be placed in a special trust fund.

Concerning the recovery of almost a billion worth of funds used for the laptop procurement, Poa said they would discuss it with their legal office as well as the Office of the Solicitor General as they would serve as their legal counsel in cases where fund recovery was concerned.

In August 2022, the Blue Ribbon Committee launched its investigation into DepEd's purchase of "outdated and pricey" laptops through PS-DBM.

The probe focused on the memorandum of agreement (MOA) used for the procurement and the bidding process that the PS-DBM and the DepEd conducted.

Senator Sherwin Gatchalian tagged the laptop procurement deal as "defective" after a DepEd official testified that the MOA was signed only after the invitation to bid was posted and the quotation for the laptops was requested.

In its 2021 annual audit report, the Commission on Audit flagged DepEd for purchasing more expensive laptops than the ones indicated in their budget, which resulted in the procurement of fewer units, depriving over 28,000 teachers of the benefit. — DVM, GMA Integrated News