Sources

Where it comes from

Every figure here is the government’s own, from the PhilGEPS open data dashboards run by the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management. Every office that buys with public money must post its bids there. We read the “Bids and Awards” and “Merchants” dashboards through the same public queries the pages make, and kept every office PhilGEPS files under BARMM.

What the words mean

A bid notice is an office announcing what it means to buy. Its approved budget is the most it may pay. An award is the contract it signed with the winning supplier, for the awarded amount. None of these is a payment: what was actually paid is in each office’s books, not on PhilGEPS.

How notices are grouped

PhilGEPS files each notice under one of about 200 business categories. To make them searchable we gather those into ten broad groups, such as construction and infrastructure, health and medicine, and food and catering. The grouping is ours, not PhilGEPS’s; each notice still shows its own category.

How it was checked

Every notice appears once, every date falls between 2019 and today, and no amount is negative. A supplier PhilGEPS spells several ways (“D&M” and “D & M”, with and without “Inc.”) is counted as one, under its most common spelling. Three regional bodies PhilGEPS files as local governments, the Office of the Chief Minister, the Bangsamoro Transition Authority and a Ministry of Public Works district office, are counted as regional offices. National offices for Region XII that sit in Cotabato City, and so are filed under BARMM by address, are left out: they serve SOCCSKSARGEN, not the region.

Two things are left as PhilGEPS published them. One award is far larger than its notice’s approved budget (₱10,132,897 against ₱420,038, Ministry of Public Works, Lanao del Sur, reference 8602960), which looks like an entry error at the source. And about 730 awards carry a date earlier than their notice’s, because the older system records when a notice was last updated rather than first posted.

What it cannot tell you

PhilGEPS holds only what an office posts; a purchase never posted is not here. Titles and procurement modes are published only for notices that reached an award, or were posted on the modernized PhilGEPS since 2024; the rest show only their category. Awards on the modernized system are not yet published by office. A few offices are filed under the wrong type, and names are as PhilGEPS writes them.

Sulu’s province and towns, out of BARMM since 2024, are left out, as is Isabela City, which PhilGEPS files under BARMM but is part of Region IX. Offices of the region’s ministries in Sulu remain.

It starts in 2019, when BARMM began; earlier notices belong to the ARMM it replaced. Offices PhilGEPS still files under the ARMM name are left out too, including the regional offices of national agencies such as the Civil Service Commission, PhilHealth and the Commission on Audit, which kept the old name.