Long queues, frustrated customers, and “offline” advisories posted on transaction windows are some of the common scenes at several Land Transportation Office (LTO) sites nationwide in the past weeks due to the slowing down of its foreign-made information technology (IT) portal, the Land Transportation Management System (LTMS).
The LTMS falloff was first reported in the last days of August, which caused delays in LTO’s processing of driver’s license applications and motor vehicle registration in most of the regions, including the National Capital Region (NCR).
In a recent interview, Makati District Office Chief Marinette Abarico said this is the “worst slowdown” they have experienced with the LTMS to date.
Some LTO frontliners, who are at the receiving end of their customers’ ire, had no choice but to render additional working hours even on weekends to process the backlogs owing to the slowdown, according to LTO-Davao South District Office Chief Melencio Diaz, Jr.
In an interview with radio dzRH, Diaz revealed their employees volunteered to work without pay even on rest days and holidays just to catch up with a month’s worth of backlogs.
Various media reports also showed the plight of motorists in transacting with the LTO in the past weeks.
A news report by ABS-CBN’s TV Patrol revealed the story of a motorist, Likha Cuevas, who went back and forth to the LTO main office in Quezon City for a week just to register her motor vehicle.
In her interview, Cuevas urged the LTO to address the root of the problem, which she said is the agency’s service provider, to ensure that this incident will not happen again.
Other motorists have been forced to skip work for several days just to complete their transactions with the LTO, sacrificing several days’ worth of income.
Some LTO clients shared their frustrations on social media. Visor, a mobility website, on its Facebook page, shared a photo of a netizen captioned “Wasting hours at LTO because they are offline.”
Another Facebook user, Louis Matthew Gabriel, shared that he took a two-day leave from work to transact with LTO but went home with nothing.
Meanwhile, student Shane Ramos said that transacting at LTO-Bataan was a “hassle for students who need to miss school and employees who need to miss a day of work” due to the intermittent connection of the LTMS.
She also complained about the “extremely hot weather” in the queuing area.
LTO has already apologized to the motoring public for the troubles caused by the system glitches as it denied allegations that the slowdown may be “internal sabotage” within the agency.
In 2018, the LTO awarded the P3.4 billion Road IT project to Dermalog and its local partners in the Joint Venture Agreement (JVA) that aims to digitize LTO transactions.
This amount is considered as Component A and is aside from Component B, which itself separately costs around another P4.8 billion, according to the deal’s documents.
The Commission on Audit (COA) earlier revealed in its report that Dermalog received “undue payment” for the project despite submitting incomplete deliverables, which is affecting LTO transactions.
Dermalog spokesperson Nikki De Vega, in a radio interview with DZBB, confirmed the foreign IT company has received approximately P3 billion in payments from the government.
The LTO already asked the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to help them solve the systems issue. The investigation is ongoing, and the agency awaits the DICT’s initial assessment in the next few days.
Despite the system slowdown, the agency continues to process transactions at a limited rate and sometimes would ask its waiting motorist customers to come back another day.
The LTO is appealing to the public for understanding and assured that it is doing its best to find a solution to the slowdown at the soonest time possible.
