Roadworks inspection | ‘There were days when it rained and they said the weather was sunny’

Following the report released this week by the Commission of Audit (CA) slamming roadworks coordination in Macau, Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau’s (IACM) head, José Tavares, immediately announced it would start internal disciplinary procedures against four inspectors who reportedly overlooked their responsibilities.

“There were days when it rained and they said the weather was sunny. They were on holiday and they signed inspections… I don’t know if this happened, but we need to wait for the probe. What I just said was in the [CA] report. We are going to investigate,” Tavares said on Monday, commenting on the report.

But what did these inspectors do wrong, according to the audit report? The CA accuses these IACM staff members of being responsible for the delay of some of the roadworks or, at least, for the failure of the government to apply the due sanctions to the contractors that failed to meet the deadlines.

The commission concluded even that, in some cases, the actions of such inspectors, besides disrespecting the internal procedure of the Bureau, go against decisions made by their own department heads.

Citing several examples, the CA notes for instance that in one example an official reported the execution period was seven days, but if the starting date of the work is the same as the date the document was signed it allows for unprofessional flexibility in the paperwork. “As advocated by the head of Division, the work would in fact have run for 11 days, that is, four days more than the expected,” the report says. But since the period is counted by the inspection records, “a license renewal was not required,” with the loss of the respective fees.

In a different case, also noted by the CA, the work inspection records “should be complete and as accurate as possible.” The report highlights how that level of competency is not reflected in the IACM reports where there are “very incomplete records as well as situations hard to explain,” the CA wrote.

One of these “situations” has to do with an inspection record that states that “work that should have taken place on one of the Saturdays in June 2014, didn’t because it was raining,” therefore being left out from the calculation of the days for the deadline of such works. However, the CA found, “the inspector in question was absent on [this] day and, therefore, could not possibly have inspected that work. In addition, according to data from the Meteorological and Geophysical Bureau (SMG) the precipitation on that day was null.” There were other reports from the same day where it was reported by other inspectors, at about the same time, that the sky was clear.

In other cases mentioned by the CA there were reports, which the data was only inserted in one case more than three months after the conclusion of the works, and in another almost one year after completion of the works.

As the Times reported yesterday, Tavares, on the sidelines of a meeting held on Monday evening, told the media that the four inspectors were moved back in 2016 to “other departments and duties.”

IACM prevents repeated road digging

The Civil and Municipal Affairs Bureau (IACM) acting vice-president of Management Committee, Lo Chi Kin, says that the repeated digging up of roads at one single location has basically been prohibited.

Lo revealed the information yesterday during a TDM talk show.  Since 2014, IACM has been studying the installation of an electronic supervision system for road construction projects. The system automatically computes information regarding road construction activities, whereby it can calculate whether a place has been repeatedly dug up within a period of two years.

The system has been under operation since last year, recording information on road engineering works tracing back to 2014.

The Commission of Audit (CA) issued a new report heavily criticizing the work of the “Roadworks Coordination Group.”

Lo said that IACM’s leaders had noticed road work supervision problems before audit reports.

The vice-president says that IACM has a different criteria from the CA regarding the definition of repeated digging up of roads.

Lo noted that IACM considers a specific construction site as a digging spot, whereas the CA regards an entire road area as one single spot.