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MND censured over procurement violationBy Joseph Yeh, The China Post TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The Control Yuan yesterday passed a motion to censure the Ministry of National Defense (MND) over its handling of several military dependents' village (眷村) renovation projects.
February 22, 2013, 12:03 am TWN The government watchdog agency said the military has violated the Government Procurement Act (政府採購法) by allowing specific contractors to win bids to renovate these decades-old villages around the country. The MND has appointed one of its units to open bids for five old village renovation projects around the country in the past few years with the total bid amount reaching NT$1.46 billion, the Control Yuan said. The unit, however, has repeatedly violated the Government Procurement Act over the bidding process of these five projects, it said. Instead of opening these bids to the public, the MND allowed only specific contractors it chose to join the bidding. In addition, none of the biddings have undergone government auditing, it added. The MND also failed to correctly calculate the current market values for these villages. As a result, the government was paying far more money to contractors than they deserved in the renovation projects, a huge waste in taxpayers' money, it said. Asked to comment, the MND said yesterday that it respects the censure made by the Control Yuan. But it did not explain why it failed to follow due procedures in this renovation projects. The motion was proposed by Control Yuan members Lin Chu-liang (尹祚芊) and Teresa Yin (尹祚芊). Military dependents' villages are communities built by the government in the late 1940s and the 1950s with the aim to serve as provisional housing for soldiers and their dependents from mainland China after the Kuomintang government retreated to Taiwan. They ended up becoming permanent settlements, forming distinct cultures of mainlanders in Taiwanese cities.
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