Disqualification from bidding surprises Smartmatic

smartmatic.com

MANILA — An official of Smartmatic Corporation admitted that they were surprised with the decision of the Commission on Election-Bids and Awards Committee (Comelec-BAC) disqualifying them in the bidding for the lease of the 23,000 Optical Mark Reader (OMR) machines.

Cesar Flores, Smartmatic Asia Pacific President is certain that they complied with all the requirements.

“We were surprised by the decision of the bas to disqualify us.

As far as we’re concerned, we know that we have complied with all the requirements and are 100% certain that we have passed all the technical tests,” he said in a statement.

Flores added, “We are ready, willing, and capable of demonstrating our full technical compliance before any forum.”

At the same time, he noted that they already filed an appeal before the BAC regarding the May 5 ruling.

“We have already filed a motion for reconsideration before the bac and we are confident that it will eventually see that we are, in fact, post-qualified,” Flores said.

It was reported that the Comelec-BAC through Resolution No. 9 dated May 5, disqualified the service-provider in the 2010 and 2013 polls during the post-qualification evaluation stage of the bidding process.

The three-page decision cited the company’s failure to submit valid Articles of Incorporation.

Likewise, the BAC also noted the failure of the demo unit to meet the requirements of the Comelec, particularly in having at least two storage devices and the capability to write to the same all data/files, audit log, statistics, and ballot images simultaneously.

(PNA)