Three months of complaints from the sector clash with a protocol that does not guarantee a payment date and also charges them the price of waiving the interest accumulated from years of arrears
SANTO DOMINGO. – Eighty-five days separate the promulgation of Law 16-26, on May 1, from the approval of the protocol that was to put it into effect, on July 7, and during that time, the construction sector documented with names and figures the cost of the wait.
Engineer Manuel Inoa warned, just twenty days after the law was enacted, that at least 18 professionals linked to claims for public works had died in recent years without seeing their debt resolved, and the protocol, already approved, responds to that urgency with a technical document that does not answer the question that matters most to a contractor: when will he get paid?.
According to the protocol, once the documentation for a case has been accepted and validated, payment will proceed "provided that budgetary conditions exist." If the Ministry of Finance and Economy cannot cover it within the current fiscal year, the recognized obligation is simply carried over to the next General State Budget.
For a contractor who has already waited for one, two, or three different administrations, the validation of their file does not yet equate to a payment date.
Adding to this uncertainty is an additional cost that the protocol does make clear: before receiving a single peso, the beneficiary must sign an irrevocable legal release and settlement document, by which they expressly waive the right to claim interest, penalties, damages, costs or fees arising from the accumulated delay.
In other words, the contractor who gets paid after a decade of waiting will receive the original amount for the project, without compensation for the time or the financial damage that the wait has caused.
A previous complaint
The Codiano Institutional Committee (CIC), which brings together a large part of the claimants, had warned since June that the speed with which Congress approved the law contrasted with the slowness of its implementation.
The general coordinator of the CIC, architect Emiliano Familia, pointed out at the time that 48 days had passed since the entry into force of Law 16-26 without the integration of the commission in charge of executing it even being announced.
The complaint insisted on a point that the protocol, months later, only partially resolves: the priority for the files of elderly contractors, those with deteriorating health or whose family assets are compromised by the wait.
The protocol does incorporate oversight, provided by the Dominican College of Engineers, Architects and Surveyors (CODIA) and the National Association of Asphalt Producers (ANPRAS), with full access to the information produced by the commission.
But just days before the document was made public, the CIC itself had demanded the incorporation of more observers into the process, in a request that suggests that, for the sector, the planned oversight still does not close the circle of trust that the law needs to function.
The issue remains unresolved
The protocol also fails to resolve the controversy that has surrounded the law since it was a bill in Congress. Representative Danilo Díaz, of the Dominican Liberation Party, questioned in May why the legislation, originally conceived to provide relief to small engineers and suppliers, ended up also including large construction companies, which in his opinion diluted the social character of the initiative: "When you see large companies, it disqualifies the social character that this project had," he stated at the time.
The list of 856 beneficiary contractors that the commission currently manages does not distinguish, at least publicly, between the small supplier hoping to settle a personal debt and the company with the capacity to absorb the delay.
The Minister of Finance and Economy himself, Magín Díaz, had tried to limit the scope of the law weeks before the approval of the protocol, specifying that it does not cover works carried out without any type of contract, but those whose supporting documentation was lost or never existed for chronological reasons, given that the current rigorous standards of the Comptroller General of the Republic did not apply ten or fifteen years ago.
That clarification, however, is not developed in the same detail in the finally approved protocol, which leaves the evaluation on a case-by-case basis to the commission.
With the protocol now approved, the clock starts ticking again for a sector that learned, over almost three months, that the speed at which legislation is passed does not always translate into the speed at which payments are made.
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