Unnecessary fees

Hidden Agenda

- MARY ANN LL. REYES

As it turns out, many of the Land Transportation Office fees being paid by vehicle owners and drivers could have been avoided had the LTO simply done its job.

As early as 2023, the LTO announced that it will continue to use its old information technology system developed by Stradcom Corp. instead of the Land Transportation Management System or LTMS because the latter has had persistent performance issues.

The LTMS, an online portal of LTO developed together with German IT company Dermalog, was supposed to facilitate vehicle registration and license applications electronically instead of having to physically go to LTO offices.

The successful operation of the LTMS was supposed to be a joint effort of the LTO and Dermalog. But observers say that LTO has chosen to blame Dermalog solely for the problems that have prevented the full utilization of the system without even identifying the problem areas.

And because the LTMS has not been fully functional, the LTO has allowed its personnel to continue using the old IT system.

Unfortunately, it is the public that has been unfairly shouldering the expenses for LTO's failure to spearhead the resolution of these problems.

The success of LTMS lies on the collaborative efforts of Dermalog and LTO's Management Information Division (MID), which is the key implementing and supporting division inside LTO for meeting LTMS goals.

Not many people know that Dermalog's responsibilities are limited to the following: primary support for 24 pilot sites and second line support for all other 380 LTO sites from acceptance date of August 2019 onwards as well as main support for all centralized servers including but not limited to: database, apps, and web servers and the seven core application software modules.