THE House of Representatives’ Committee on Transportation on Thursday started looking into the shortage of license plates and plastic cards for driver’s licenses being issued by the Land Transportation Office (LTO).
At the hearing, Transportation Assistant Secretary Jose Arturo Tugade asserted that the LTO was doing its best to address the backlog in driver’s license cards.
As of May 2, there was a total of 234,149 backlogs, the LTO admitted.
The committee chaired by Antipolo Rep. Romeo Acop held a motu proprio inquiry into the shortage of plastic ID cards for driver’s licenses.
Tugade told the committee that of the 234,149 shortage of driver’s license cards was the most ever recorded, with Region 4A accounting for 47,125 backlogs, followed by Region 3 with 38,728.
He said the agency targets to produce 80 percent of the backlogs in license plates by the end of 2023.
He also assured the committee that “contingencies have been prepared to address” the problem and to make its target achievable.
Tugade maintained that several measures have been done to enable the LTO increase the number of driver’s license cards to be procured in the succeeding years. These include to have a one-year buffer based on yearly-projected number of transactions: secure a multi-year contracting authority which may possibly need the President’s approval and separate the schedule of delivery of cards for the current year and the succeeding year.
Based on the LTO records submitted to the committee, several LTO offices recorded the following backlogs: 32,400 in Region 7; 18,695 in Region 12; 15,777 in Region 11; 11,420 in Region 10; 11,414 in Region 6; 10, 511 in Region 9; 9,565 in Region 8; 9,177 in Region 2; 8,789 in Cariaga Region; 7,983 in Region 1; 6,970 in Region 5; 5,716 in Cordillera Administrative Region; 4,236 in National Capital Region-West and 1,359 in National Capital Region East. Maricel V. Cruz
“In addition, the LTO said they will secure source codes of the Land Transportation Management System from Dermalog (supplier of driver’s license cards) for the LTO ton have full control over the system on top of implementing a Digital License program in partnership with the Department of Information Technology Communications,” he said.
Tugade has approved the extension of the validity of expired driver’s licenses until Oct. 31 to tentatively resolve the shortage of plastic cards.
Tugade earlier said the LTO consumes at least 30,000 plastic cards daily for the driver’s licenses.
Tugade said funding for the procurement of license plates has been appropriated.
For her part, LTO Undersecretary Kim de Leon said deadline for the submission of the bidding documents for 5.2 million driver’s license cards worth P240 million is on May 24.”
De Leon also said there were seven firms or entities which were expected to bid for the project, including the previous supplier Dermalog.