THE LONE bid submitted for the last project under the Aquino administration’s public-private partnership (PPP) program will still need the approval of a National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) body.

In a statement on Wednesday, the PPP Center Executive Director Andre C. Palacios said the NEDA-Investment Coordination Committee (NEDA-ICC) will still have to evaluate the bid submitted by Unisys Public Sector Services Corp. for the the Philippine Statistics Authority’s (PSA) project to improve the country’s civil registry system.

“We are very pleased with the financial bid submitted by the lone bidder. We know that this is still subject to detailed evaluation and approval by the ICC,” Mr. Palacios said of the Phase 2 of the Civil Registry System Information Technology Project (CRS-ITP).

A lone bid submitted for any PPP project has to be submitted again to the ICC for approval, before being awarded.

Last June 10, Unisys was the only company to submit a bid for the P1.59-billion project. Two other pre-qualified bidders, Morpho-Filmetrics-Frey Consortium and PNJ Partnership Consortium, did not participate in the bidding.

The PPP Center said Unisys proposed a 45.5% concessionaire’s revenue share, which is lower than the 57.87% cap set by the PSA, the project’s proponent.

“Most probably, we’ll get [the ICC approval] because it’s lower than the cap,” Mr. Palacios said.

Earlier, Mr. Palacios said if the bid is seen as compliant, the contract will be awarded on July 26, and signed by September.

The project is expected to take two years to develop, including the construction of a new building and the development of the entirely new IT system.

The winning bidder for the Phase 2 of CRS-ITP will finance, design, develop, operate and maintain the civil registry system for the PSA. It will collect, access, store, maintain and manage civil registry documents and the specimen signatures of all city and municipal registrars using imaging technology.

The project also includes production of vital statistics and will make the civil registry services available nationwide.

The contract for Phase 1 of the CRS-ITP, which began more than a decade ago, expired in 2012. It was extended twice, first in 2015, and now up to March 2017.

The NEDA Board, chaired by President Benigno S. C. Aquino III, approved the project on July 15, 2015.

22 June 2016
By Vince Alvic Alexis F. Nonato