There is a relatively small office in Quezon City that gets little attention but plays a crucial role in government, including in the conduct of local and national elections—the National Printing Office (NPO).

With a staff complement of more than 200, the NPO is under the administrative supervision of the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) headed by Secretary Herminio Coloma who had designated Undersecretary for Operations George Syliangco to oversee NPO and other government media entities.

Last November, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano and House minority leader Danilo Suarez of Quezon have questioned NPO’s decision to award a P780-million contract for the printing of 55 million ballots for the May elections to Holy Family Printing Corp., a private entity.

To safeguard the security features of election forms, particularly the ballots, it sounds logical that printing be done by the NPO. If the NPO printing machines cannot fully serve the printing job, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the Asian Productivity Organization Production Unit, a government controlled entity, have adequate printing equipment to complete the work.

Commission on Elections chairman Sixto Brillantes had brushed aside the concerns that Suarez and Cayetano raised, saying that these came from losing bidders Smartmatic-Total Information Management and a consortium that includes a subsidiary of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT).

The two bidders did not actually lose, but were disqualified due to technicalities.

Smartmatic president Cesar Flores and the PLDT consortium lawyer, Carl John Mucho, have accused NPO of playing favorites by prescribing requirements that were tailor-made for Holy Family.

Smartmatic did not meet the requirement that the bidder should be in existence for at least six years, while the PLDT consortium failed to submit documents guaranteeing that its goods would be free from defects. Both bidders also did not meet the procurement rules requiring bidders to have done a contract worth at least 50 percent of the project they are bidding for, which the NPO pegged at P192 million for the ballot-printing contract.

Holy Family has been doing business with NPO for years. It also figured in a questionable printing contract during the 2004 elections. Long-time employees and other bidders are NPO concur with the statement that it is one of the favored bidders at NPO.

Both Cayetano and Suarez, who sounded out the concerns and complaints that Smartmatic and the PLDT consortium had aired, were apprehensive about serious problems in the conduct of the mid-term elections in May because Holy Family’s ballots did not fit in the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines supplied by Smartmatic.

News reports had quoted Flores as saying that Smartmatic’s PCOS machines could be blamed for the inadequacies of Holy Family in the May elections. “Their sample ballots either got jammed or were not read by our machines and the bleeding of the ink on their paper is unacceptable, they were rejected by the machines,” Flores was quoted.

This issue brings back controversies about anomalous deals at the NPO raised by a private printer long before this brouhaha over the contract for the May 2013 election ballots came up.

Perhaps, it is about time to take a serious look at the structure and workings not only of the NPO but also the APO Production Unit and the central bank’s Printing Office with a view of consolidating the government’s printing assets, overhauling its functions and coming up with a single competitive printing office that can generate income for the government.

The NPO, formerly the Bureau of Printing, was originally created on November 7, 1901 through Philippine Commission Act 296 and renamed as Government Printing Office in 1972. Its administrative jurisdiction had been moved from one agency to another over the years: from the Department of Public Instruction on its inception in 1901 to the Department of Finance in 1918, and to the Office of the President in 1947. Under the Executive office, the NPO still shuttled jurisdiction under the Department of General Services to the Office of the Secretary, the Philippine Information Agency, and lately, the Presidential Communications Operations Office.

A series of incongruous issuances from one administration to another has created one hell of a mess at the National Printing Office, and the challenge to the Aquino administration to clean it up seemed off to a bad start.

The frequent turnover of directors—14 in all, most of them in acting or office-in-charge capacity, and who were political protégés without background or experience in the printing business—in the last 20 years surely does not speak well of such a small agency being managed properly.

The central issue of controversy is whether or not NPO can sub-contract printing requests for accountable forms of government agencies. Another is whether NPO is authorized to accredit commercial private printers and limit most bidding to favored ones through selective bidding or emergency procurement.

An insertion in the 2010 General Appropriations Act made the issue even more complicated. Section 29 of Republic Act 9770, placed the APO Production Unit on equal footing with the NPO and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas as the only recognized government printers to handle the printing needs of government offices, including local government units and state corporations. The provision was carried over to the 2011 and 2012 national government budget programs.

The constitutionality of the GAA provision is in question because it is considered a temporary law that amends a permanent statute. The issue got bigger after the Government Procurement Policy Board (GPPB) recognized the GAA provision when it issued Resolution 05-2010 that prescribes policy guidelines on printing procurement.

The GPPB policy, which came out in October 2010 explicitly prohibits the NPO from engaging, subcontracting, or assigning any private printer to print government accountable forms.

The GPPB guidelines, however, went unheeded until March 28, 2011 when PCOO Secretary Coloma issued a memorandum to both NPO and APO, its sister-agency, to adhere to the GPPB policy.

But while subcontracting of printing jobs may have been stopped, NPO and APO are now into another scheme that presents new opportunities for corruption: leasing of printing machines and peripheral equipment because they do not have the capacity to service the printing needs of government agencies and local government units.

The leasing arrangement is planned as a stop-gap measure while awaiting the acquisition of new machines, which is not likely to happen soon.
 
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