Spanish
Santo Domingo.– President Luis Abinader returned to the Chamber of Deputies the bill authorizing the payment of debts for works executed without a contract, approved last week under an urgent procedure and without being previously studied in committees.
The return of the piece includes a series of observations from the Executive Branch, which must be approved or rejected in their entirety by the National Congress, without the possibility of introducing new modifications to the legislative text.
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The initiative, driven with the support of the legislative majority of the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), seeks to authorize payment to small contractors for public works and corrective maintenance of schools carried out without a formal contract. The president of the Dominican College of Engineers, Architects and Surveyors (Codia), Enrique Rosario, assured that the observations made by the president are "only in form" and do not affect the substance of the project. In that sense, he expressed his confidence that the law will be ratified again by the legislators and subsequently enacted. The bill originated from a preliminary draft prepared by Codia, which identifies 571 companies and beneficiaries to whom the State owes payments for work carried out for more than 30 years. Of that total, 95 contractors executed public works and 476 carried out corrective maintenance for the Ministry of Education (Minerd). Among the public institutions with the highest debts are the Ministry of Public Works, the Ministry of Housing and Buildings, the Indrhi, the Inapa, the Presidential Commission for Support to Provincial Development, the Central Electoral Board and the Mayor's Office of the National District. The law differentiates public works from corrective maintenance and establishes that, in this last line, the only organization with outstanding debts is the Minerd, which accumulates 1,217 unpaid projects to 476 contractors throughout the country. The works include painting, electrical repairs, remodeling, roof finishing, court installation and other corrective measures in educational centers. Although the initiative defines the payment mechanism through the Ministry of Finance and Economy, it does not specify the total amount of resources, a situation that motivated the abstention of the opposition benches during the vote. According to Article 103 of the Constitution, Congress has two ordinary legislatures to consider the president's observations. If it fails to do so within that period, the law would be automatically approved with the observations of the Executive Branch.
