We cannot do the same things and achieve different results. Today, the Philippine scenario is a “perfect crime” scene for government contracts.

Right from the start, the development councils hardly matter. It’s the influential politicians and their executive agency cohorts who determine the National Expenditure Budget. This is followed by the infamous insertions and abuse of the “Unprogrammed Funds”—a pork barrel in disguise. Our country now faces at least a trillion-peso loss from graft-frittered flood control projects alone over the last 15 years.

This “loss” begins even at the concept stage. For instance, hazard maps and risks are often exaggerated, leading to bloated costs. The cruel “use it or lose it” principle encourages proponents to add unnecessary work to justify the inflated budget. Bidding is 100 percent rigged, with the supposed “losers” agreeing to a small cut of the syndicated bid.

The base cost for government work is typically 30–100 percent higher than private estimates. Try using the Construction Cost Guidebook published by Quantity Solutions Inc. (QSI), an award-winning quantity surveying company, to find out the price differentials. A copy was given to the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, through its former adviser, Baguio City Mayor Benjie Magalong, by QSI CEO Engr. Rynor Jamandre. Local Government Units (LGUs) tracking well-funded projects should have a similar copy of the book.

The reality is that private companies cut costs to maximize profit, a virtue not found in government practice. The DPWH, on the other hand, uses the “Bill of Materials” method—an “operational document”—which is inferior to the globally recognized good governance practice of using the “Bill of Quantities” method. The latter is a “contractual document” signed off by licensed Quality Surveyors (QS).

Today, the Commission on Audit (COA) appears more like an absolute failure—a rubber-stamp after-the-fact entity. It is miles apart from the auditing methods of modern economies. Currently, the Commissioner's wife is said to have cornered government contracts—a solid conflict of interest—yet the Commissioner has not even been called to investigations. Senate Blue Ribbon Committee chairman Panfilo Lacson suggests that the COA gets a 21 to 1 percent cut of the dirty pie to look the other way. When the guard is sleeping, we are not surprised by the wholesale pillage.

Moreover, former COA Commissioner Heidi Mendoza states that our financial system is still hampered by a fragmented, outdated, and "prone to manipulation" data system. The government has failed to modernize the financial process, which remains largely paper-based and lacks digitized invoicing.

Proposed antidotes

Foreign-funded projects do not suffer the same fate as locally-financed ones, which, unfortunately, constitute 70 percent of the total government contracts. Foreign projects use the Quantity Survey method, maintaining a hands-on approach from concept to completion, covering base costs, contingencies, and implementation. Two examples of these almost flawless foreign-assisted projects are the BCDA/SCETEX project and the last portion of the Centennial Project. This method keeps precise track of the base cost, contingencies, and all financial charges during the implementation, then executes those plans with precision.

Banker and former SSS Commissioner Rene Valencia (speaking for ANI—Advocates for National Interest, a group of retired senior military officers) believes there is a need for legislation mandating that all big-ticket items be funded by major financial institutions like the JBIC, ADB, or the World Bank. These institutions monitor and control the projects, providing EPC (Engineering and Design, Purchase of Materials and Labor, and Construction Plans).

For locally-funded projects, legislation must also be in place to require the use of international or local Quality Surveyors to ensure faithfulness to the plans. (Leading local Quality Surveyors include Northcroft, Hearn and Hearn Consulting, Metro Solutions, Quantity Surveyors Inc., and Quantity Solutions Inc.).

The Philippine Domestic Construction Board (PDCB) recommends the institutionalization of Quality Surveying (an international professional discipline) in all government projects and recommends COA to buy into the discipline, as a matter of law, to enhance its CPES (Construction Performance Evaluation System).

In a parallel vein, for transparent citizen participation, Senator Bam Aquino has filed Senate Bill 1330, introducing the concept of “blockchain” in monitoring government projects. Basically, everyone (the public included) gets their own copy of the same ledger that records all project transactions in real time. Since the entries cannot be tampered with or erased, it becomes a “tamper-proof, citizen-verifiable audit trail for the full cycle of government projects.”

The Office of Aquino, however, told us it is still a work-in-progress in consultation with tech experts. They are wary of the "garbage in-garbage out" syndrome, inherent, perhaps, in a system with a decrepit database, per COA Commissioner Mendoza.

For many years, the Philippines has had one of the biggest national budgets in the ASEAN region, but one with the poorest infrastructure. Corruption has been fingered as the main culprit—an irony for the only Christian nation in the Far East.

The investigation into past crimes is ongoing, which is well and good. But moving forward, modern technology—using the Quality Survey System and the Blockchain—must be deployed to short-circuit this gangland-type of thievery in our national treasury.

The crooks have wisened up. They don't accept checks or cash directly as pay-offs and register assets, near money, and cash in the names of other people to evade detection and conviction. We, therefore, have to use modern technology to combat them and make sure they do not have the first chance to lay their slimy hands on the people's hard-earned money.