by Aurelio Peña
DOING BUSINESS with the government, national or local, can be both tempting and daunting to many businessmen who still haven’t wet their feet in this area. For engineering contractors and bigtime service providers doing business legally and legitimately, this could be profitable, especially if they have the patience of a prophet who can wait for 3,000 years (!) before their bills are paid by government accounting offices.
Here at the City hall, before you ever take the first step, the guys at General Services will tell you from the start that you need to be an “ACCREDITED” supplier or contractor . Accreditation, as you already know by now, will need you to “COMPLY WITH REQUIREMENTS”.
These three fearful words, in fact, have terrorized many suppliers, contractors and traders hoping to do business with the government.
Naturally, this means you need to have the basics for starting a real, honest-to-goodness, legitimate business : getting a business permit, business name registration by DTI, income tax returns, identification cards, bank statements, etc, etc
But the General Service guys also told us that even if you have all these “Requirements” — you still WON’T GET PAID” even if you have already delivered the goods or services to the government office that contracted you to supply the service or goods.
If that office failed to follow the “legal and proper procedure” of submitting the “Service Contract” to you BEFORE you even started to work on the project you were contracted for—- you’ll have a big difficulty in getting paid after submitting your Billing Statements to the City Hall accounting office.
It’s a very frustrating process even if you’re “accredited” and have already “complied with requirements” demanded by City Hall accounting and auditing offices.
But it’s even far worse if you’re NOT accredited and you CANNOT “comply with requirements” and yet, a government office got you to do a type of special project that cannot be supplied by an accredited and legitimate outfit. It’s a real dilemna for both the government and the service provider who isn’t doing the job as a fulltime business.
And this happens so many times here, it makes you often wonder why these guys haven’t come up with a system or a “process” that’s acceptable to both government accountants and auditors who won’t give a damn unless you’re “accredited” and ready to “comply with requirements”
To be honest with you, it’s easier for a carabao to enter the eye of a needle than for a contractor to get paid by the government…
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