The Philippine Online Chronicles

Smartmatic-TIM, the Commission on Elections (Comelec’s) corporate partner during the 2010 elections, has not yet been paid in full for the Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines and other election paraphernalia. According to Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez, it is possible that the company will not be fully paid if it is found that it has committed lapses in its contract.

“Government contracts are structured that way. You have the entire amount and it’s up to several tranches and each tranche is tied to a specific milestone. If they meet the milestone, you give them money,” Jimenez said.

"Our estimate is that we still have not given them 10 percent to 20 percent of the contract,” he added. The contract totals P7.2 billion.

Smartmatic has been hounded by controversy following numerous reports of malfunctions in the PCOS machines as well as allegations of fraud during the country’s first automated elections.

“We will not complete the whole contract and write finish to it unless each account has been settled,” Jimenez added. “We will have to look at the liability of the Smartmatic for various aspects of the program, especially the things that they have admitted to have done wrong. For instance the compact flash (CF) cards, they admitted that. So we have to find out what is the impact of that in our payment.”

Thousands of CF cards were found to be faulty in the run-up to the elections and had to be immediately replaced. Some have questioned whether the need to replace the CF cards was used as a front to pre-program them with erroneous elections results.

According to Jimenez, both Comelec and Smartmatic will have to make an evaluation of the company’s overall performance.

“They (Smartmatic) will have to conduct their own study of what went wrong. Apart from that, we are going to look at their performance vis-à-vis their contract,” Jimenez said.

“Apart from the money we haven't paid them, they have also posted a performance bond,” he said. “There are a lot of ways we can proceed against [them] in case we need to do it.”