The Supreme Court was asked by the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) to immediately resolve the petition against the P3.19 billion contract signed in 2018 by the Land Transportation Office (LTO) with German firm Dermalog Joint Venture for the country’s Land Transportation Management System (LTMS).
The motion, filed by the OSG on 9 September, urged the Court to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) to immediately stop the enforcement of the contract.
The petition, signed by Solicitor General Darlene Marie B. Berberabe, told the SC that the LTMS of Dermalog “is a seriously flawed system that should not be used any longer.”
Further, the SC was told that the LTMS of Dermalog “is unreliable, dangerous, and poses a greater threat to the interest of the State and to national security.”
If a TRO is issued, the OSG asked the Court to order Dermalog to release and turn over the source code and database to the LTO.
The OSG also pleaded with the SC to stop the LTO from implementing the LTMS to prevent serious damage to the government and the public, as well as to stop further payments to Dermalog.
The OSG informed the Court that on 20 August 2025, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Transportation inquired into the status of LTO’s LTMS with Dermalog. It said Congress suggested filing another motion for early resolution “inasmuch as it involves public interest.”
A petition was filed in March 2024 before the SC against the LTMS, which was designed to integrate all LTO services—such as driver’s license issuance, vehicle registration, and transport permit issuance—into a single database and digital platform.
Under the project, the LTMS would serve as a web-based core system replacing the old LTO system, including the establishment and operation of an exclusive on-premises private cloud, network operations center, technical support, and helpdesk centers.
The petition said that after years of waiting, the LTMS “remains incomplete and not fully utilized due to inherent defects in its design, illegal amendments to the contract, and flawed acceptance.”
The petitioners, Gerald Domingo and lawyer Jose Carlito M. Montenegro, asked the Court to issue a TRO or injunction stopping the LTO from paying Dermalog for maintenance, change orders, and other fees, as well as from using the LTMS.
“Unless enjoined by the SC, both the government and the public will be constrained to continue using the wholly substandard, inefficient, defective, ill-conceived and incomplete LTMS,” Domingo and Montenegro said in their petition.
They added: “Paying Dermalog, keeping LTO technologically captured, continually exposing unauthorized access to LTO’s data in foreign countries… undermine public welfare, threaten national security, and breach informational privacy of LTO data subjects, like herein petitioners who are taxpayers, drivers, motorists and motor vehicle owners.”