The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) on Thursday, Aug. 17 said the issues outlined in the 2022 report of the Commission on Audit (COA) had already been resolved.

In response to the questioned purchase of relief goods with a “non-food” trader, DSWD spokesperson Assistant Secretary Romel Lopez said the P173.8 million supply contract for food packs in its regional office in Caraga was done through emergency procurement as a result of the onslaught of typhoon Odette in December 2021.

“It must be noted that the supplier is engaged in the food business and has been providing services for years, notably in the provision of family food packs, raw materials, and goods for the supplementary feeding program in the Caraga region,” Lopez said in a press statement.

“The concerned supplier has already submitted their Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) certificate of registration that reflects their line of business, which allows them to engage in food supplies and pre-packed family food packs. The document was submitted to the audit team last March 2023,” he added.

In the 2022 audit report on the DSWD, state auditors said the DSWD-Caraga awarded 93 percent of the contract to the questioned supplier based in Butuan City.

Lopez said the DSWD-Central Office has been assured by the DSWD-Caraga’s Bids and Awards Committee that “all succeeding bidding projects will require the prospective bidders to submit and attach their BIR certificate of registration for further evaluation.”

‘Non-halal’ food packs, ‘poor’ quality rice

Moreover, he noted that the DSWD-Zamboanga Peninsula has already begun taking corrective action in response to the COA’s findings that the food packs distributed in the region were of low quality, not halal-certified, and contained six kilograms of rice that appeared to be of poor quality.

“The DSWD management has given a directive to all regional offices that rice of poor quality should not be packed and shall be immediately replaced with good quality rice. Moreover, the Central Office has issued a memorandum to consider putting the ‘halal certified’ sticker and list of the goods included in the family food packs,” Lopez said.

According to DSWD records, the previous administration under Secretary Rolando Bautista had already addressed the problem by returning the disputed rice to the National Food Authority in January 2022 due to discolored grain of a quality unfit for human consumption, the DSWD spokesperson added.

“As per the current administration’s policy, our disaster response cluster has been working on ways to improve our relief distribution and mechanism, which calls for the immediate replacement of compromised relief items by the suppliers. With the ‘Buong Bansa Handa’ program, we hope to improve our supply chain in a timely and efficient manner utilizing both government and private supply channels,” he said.