Twenty-two construction firms bid for flood-control work in Negros Oriental six times or more between 2021 and 2025. Between them they filed 352 bids across 85 of the province’s 117 flood-control contracts, covering ₱3.86 billion of the ₱4.51 billion awarded.
They won nothing. Not one contract, not once.
That is not the only thing about this province’s flood-control bidding that does not behave the way bidding is supposed to. Breaking News Negros Oriental matched all 117 contracts in the government’s own Sumbong sa Pangulo database against the Department of Public Works and Highways’ contract records — the ceiling price, the amount actually awarded, and the full list of firms that bid on each — and then measured the result against 209,095 DPWH contracts nationwide.
Three things came out of it.
The numbers at a glance
- 117 flood-control contracts, ₱4,506,031,039 awarded
- +0.04 — the correlation between how many firms bid and how far the price falls. Effectively zero
- 1.02% median discount below ceiling here, against 2.60% nationally
- 0 contracts in Negros Oriental have ever been awarded more than 10% below ceiling
- 22 firms bid six or more times and won nothing — 42.2% of every bid slot in the province
One: more bidders does not mean a lower price
This is the part that should not happen.
In a competitive tender, the government sets a ceiling — the Approved Budget for the Contract — and firms bid beneath it. The more firms that show up, the harder each has to cut to win. More bidders, lower price. It is the entire mechanism by which public bidding is supposed to save public money.
In Negros Oriental’s flood-control contracts, it does not operate.
| Bidders on the contract | Contracts | Median discount below ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7 | 0.89% |
| 2–3 | 16 | 0.81% |
| 4–6 | 38 | 1.20% |
| 7–11 | 34 | 1.01% |
| 12 or more | 22 | 1.09% |
A contract with one bidder and a contract with twelve produce the same price. Measured statistically, the relationship between bidder count and discount is +0.04 — indistinguishable from none.
Twelve firms can turn up to contest a ₱45-million river wall and the government still pays within about one per cent of what it was already prepared to pay.
Two: the discounts are shallower than the rest of the country
Set against the national record, Negros Oriental is an outlier in the direction of the contractor.
| Nationwide | Negros Oriental | |
|---|---|---|
| Median discount below the ceiling | 2.60% | 1.02% |
| Flood control specifically | 3.01% | 2.00% |
| Awards landing more than 2% below | 61.9% | 35.1% |
| Awards landing more than 25% below | 0.5% | never |
| Deepest discount on record | 66.43% | 20.45% |
Across 209,095 contracts nationwide, roughly a thousand were awarded at more than a quarter below the ceiling — the mark of a tender where firms genuinely fought for the work. In Negros Oriental that has never once happened. Across all 117 flood-control contracts, not one came in even ten per cent below the ceiling. The deepest cut anyone made in five years was 20.45%, and it was a single contract.
The province is not merely at the shallow end of the national range. It does not reach into the deep end at all.
Three: the firms that are always there and never win
Across the 117 contracts, 115 different firms appear on bidder lists. Twelve of them fill 51.9% of every bid slot. And a distinct group inside that appears again and again without ever taking a contract home.
| Firm | Times it bid | Times it won | Value of work it bid on |
|---|---|---|---|
| ORANI CONSTRUCTION AND SUPPLY | 43 | 0 | ₱2,042,404,963 |
| LORENZO CONSTRUCTION & DEVELOPMENT | 42 | 0 | ₱1,874,412,859 |
| HGG BUILDERS & SUPPLY | 27 | 0 | ₱1,262,140,046 |
| ITP CONSTRUCTION, INC. | 27 | 0 | ₱1,244,827,589 |
| ED1SON DEVELOPMENT & CONSTRUCTION | 26 | 0 | ₱1,196,140,613 |
| E.K.C. CONSTRUCTION AND AGGREGATES | 25 | 0 | — |
| A.C. RIVERO DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION | 21 | 0 | — |
| C.S. RAYOS CONSTRUCTION & GENERAL SERVICES | 20 | 0 | — |
Orani Construction and Supply bid on more than two billion pesos of public work across five years and was never once the winner. Lorenzo Construction bid on ₱1.87 billion and was never once the winner.
And they tend to arrive together. Lorenzo and Orani appear on the same bidder list 29 times. ITP and Lorenzo, 26 times. E.K.C. and Lorenzo, 24 times. HGG and Lorenzo, 20 times. The same names, in the same rooms, losing to the same winners.
What this is, and what it is not
Bidding and losing is not an offence. A construction firm may bid on work it is not best placed to win, may be outpriced by a better-equipped rival, may be keeping its licence active or testing a market. Twenty-two firms losing repeatedly, on its own, proves nothing at all.
The reason competition authorities pay attention is what these three findings look like together. A price that does not respond to the number of bidders. Discounts that never reach the depth seen elsewhere in the country. A standing roster of firms that contest tenders without ever winning one.
That combination is what the Philippine Competition Commission’s own screening framework describes when it looks for cover bidding — the practice of filing losing bids so that a tender appears to have been contested when the outcome was not in doubt. It is prohibited under Republic Act No. 10667.
This report does not assert that cover bidding occurred in Negros Oriental. The records that would settle it are the abstracts of bids — the per-contract documents showing what each firm actually offered, not merely that it turned up. Those are held by the Bids and Awards Committees of the three district engineering offices and have not been made public.
The Office of the Ombudsman’s flood-control investigation already covers Negros Oriental alongside Cebu, Bohol and Eastern Visayas, and had 209 complaints under fact-finding in the first half of 2026. Whether any of what is set out above amounts to an offence is for that office and for the Commission to determine. What the public record establishes is narrower, and still worth stating plainly: in this province, over five years and ₱4.5 billion, the number of firms bidding for flood-control work has made no difference to what the public paid.
A note on sources. Every figure here comes from two official government sources and from nothing else: the Sumbong sa Pangulo flood-control database of the Office of the President and DPWH, and the DPWH Transparency contract records, from which all 117 contracts and their 835 individual bid records were retrieved one at a time. The national comparison uses 209,095 DPWH contracts carrying both a ceiling and an award amount. No project list compiled by any news organisation was used. Peso figures are amounts awarded, not budget ceilings.