COA hits ‘out of cash’ Landbank ATMs

MANILA, Philippines – The Commission on Audit (COA urged the Land Bank of the Philippines (Landbank) to find a new private firm to handle its automated teller machine (ATMs) due to poor performance of its current service provider.

The current service provider was not identified in COA’s 2017 audit report.

In the report, state auditors pointed out that 268 Landbank machines were “continuously out of cash.” It added that the longest period recorded that a machine had this status was more than 4 days. 

COA, in the report, also documented incidents where replenishment of ATMs was canceled for no valid reason. The money supposed to be loaded into the machines were returned to the service provider’s private vaults.

“The contract … permitted the service provider to have complete control in determining the manner, time, date, and the ATM units to be replenished, resulting [in] inefficient cash loading and unavailability of the ATM,” state auditors said.

“Absence of implementing guidelines in the evaluation of the reasonableness of the cash order requests resulted in the accumulation of idle volume of cash in the vault of the service provider, rather than loading to the out of cash ATMs,” they added. 

Landbank’s Debit Cards and ATM Management Department (DCAMD) acknowledged the problems, adding that “there is an ongoing study on not renewing” the contract of the service provider. 

The current service provider’s contract expires in August 2019. – Rappler.com