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MEARB in the Philippines: What the New Bid Evaluation Standard Actually Requires
RA 12009 shifted procurement away from lowest price. Here is what that means for how a bid has to be built.
When the New Government Procurement Act took effect in 2024 and its implementing rules followed in February 2025, the conversation in procurement circles largely focused on what changed at the policy level. The move away from the Lowest Calculated and Responsive Bid standard toward the Most Economically Advantageous Responsive Bid, or MEARB, was covered as a significant shift. What received less attention is what that shift actually requires of a bidder preparing a submission.
This article is not a general overview of RA 12009, which we have covered separately. It focuses specifically on how MEARB works in practice, what documentation actually carries weight in a value-based evaluation, and where the framework is still developing. The distinction matters because understanding that the rules changed is not the same as understanding what to do differently.
MEARB Is Not a Mystery
One of the more useful things to know about MEARB is that it is not a discretionary judgment call that bidders have to guess at. When a procuring entity uses MEARB for a project, the law requires the Invitation to Bid and the Instructions to Bidders to disclose, in advance, the specific criteria that will be used to evaluate quality, the weight or score assigned to each criterion, and the quality-to-price ratio that will determine the award. That information is in the bidding documents before a single bid is submitted.
This has a practical implication that is easy to miss. A bidder who reads the bidding documents carefully before building its submission is competing on fundamentally different terms than one who submits a standard package and relies on price to carry the evaluation. The weights are not hidden. The criteria are declared. The question is whether a bidder treats them as the actual contest or as a background formality.
Under the IRR, the evaluation process for goods and infrastructure procured through MEARB is sequenced in a specific way. Quality is screened first. Only bids that meet a minimum quality score have their financial envelopes opened. A bidder that falls below the quality threshold is set aside before its price is ever compared to anyone else’s. This means price can only do its work after quality has been established, and in tenders where the quality component carries 60 to 85 percent of the total weight, quality is where the contest actually happens.
The Price Band Is Narrower Than Many Bidders Expect
The law sets a band for how much price can count in a MEARB evaluation. For goods and infrastructure, the price component must carry between 15 and 40 percent of the total score. The rest comes from quality criteria.
The specific split within that band is set by the procuring entity for each project, which means variability is built into the system. Real agency examples already show the range. The National Privacy Commission’s procurement of a new registration system used an 80 percent quality and 20 percent price ratio, with a minimum 60 percent quality score required before any financial envelope was opened. The Philippine Center for Economic Development used a 65 percent quality and 35 percent price ratio under the related MEAQ standard for quotations, with a 40 percent quality passing score.
These are not outliers. They reflect the discretion the law gives procuring entities to calibrate the quality-price balance based on the nature and complexity of what is being procured. For bidders, the practical takeaway is that a 20 percent price component in a high-value tender changes the economics of bidding in a fundamental way. Being meaningfully cheaper than a competitor may not be enough to overcome a significant quality gap, and in some tenders, it will not be enough at all.
What Quality Actually Covers
Quality under MEARB is broader than technical compliance. The IRR expressly allows agencies to include qualitative, environmental, and social criteria linked to the specific contract. Depending on how the bidding documents are written, quality criteria can include technical merit and track record, design, approach and methodology, accessibility, tools and equipment, social and environmental characteristics, personnel qualifications and deployment plans, ongoing service commitments, after-sales arrangements, delivery conditions, and disposal measures.
The commercial implication is significant. A bidder’s service model, team qualifications, reliability record, sustainability practices, and after-sales support can all count toward the evaluation, but only if the agency included them as stated criteria and only if the bidder’s submission provides evidence that can actually be assessed against those criteria. A well-prepared bidder that describes itself in general terms as high quality is not competing on the same terms as one that maps specific evidence to each stated criterion in the bidding documents.
This is the practical core of what MEARB changes. Value claims need to be evidenced, not asserted. The NPC’s bidding documents, for instance, expressly called for brochures, catalogs, and company proposals as supporting material for each quality component. That is an agency operationalizing the principle in a concrete way: supporting documentation must track the stated criteria.
Sustainability Is Part of the Framework, but Not Uniformly Operationalized
The IRR includes substantive provisions on sustainable procurement. Products, materials, or structures with green specifications are to be given greater weight in bid evaluation. Agencies are required to integrate environmental, social, and economic criteria into specifications, evaluations, and decisions. Section 13 formally brings lifecycle assessment and lifecycle cost analysis into the procurement architecture, covering project planning, eligibility and selection criteria, and contract implementation.
For businesses that already maintain environmental certifications, track lifecycle costs, or operate with documented sustainability commitments, these provisions create a real point of connection between internal practices and procurement evaluation. The sustainability thread also connects to broader risk considerations that we have written about separately, including how environmental compliance and lifecycle considerations increasingly affect permits, contracts, and operational decisions beyond the procurement context.
The honest qualification is that the sustainability and lifecycle costing provisions are statutory direction rather than fully settled practice at this point. The IRR expressly makes implementation of lifecycle assessment and lifecycle cost analysis subject to GPPB guidelines, and as of June 2026, the GPPB’s own documentation indicates that detailed LCA and LCCA implementation guidance is still forthcoming. The GPPB-TSO’s June 2026 note on its policy development work with the ADB, which focused specifically on refining merit-point methodology for MEARB and related standards, confirms that the agency itself is still developing how these tools will be applied across agencies.
The practical implication is not that sustainability claims are irrelevant. It is that lifecycle and sustainability claims carry evaluative weight only when the procuring entity has embedded them as stated criteria in its bidding documents. A claim that goes beyond what the agency can measure against its own stated framework does not earn additional weight, and can create post-award compliance risk if the bid commits to standards that turn out to be difficult to verify. For businesses navigating doing business more broadly in the Philippines, this principle extends well beyond procurement: the strongest position is always one where external claims align with what is internally documented and measurable.
Translation Is the Competitive Skill
The cross-cutting insight that runs through the IRR, the standard bidding documents, and the agency examples that have emerged so far is this: the competitive advantage under MEARB comes from translation, not from being broadly well-prepared.
A bidder wins by translating its value proposition into the specific criteria and weights stated in the bidding documents for that tender. A track record that is not referenced to a track-record criterion in the Bid Data Sheet earns nothing. An after-sales program that is not mapped to an after-sales criterion, even if it is genuinely strong, does not score. A sustainability commitment that the agency has not made part of its evaluation framework does not affect the outcome.
This is not a criticism of MEARB as a standard. It is a description of how the system is designed to work. The BDS and project specifications are the decisive frame, not generic bidder quality. That means the most important preparation step is not assembling a strong general proposal. It is reading the bidding documents carefully enough to understand exactly what the agency has said it will evaluate, and then building the submission to prove each point against each stated criterion.
The documentation that carries the most weight in practice reflects this logic: technical compliance matrices and methodology papers for quality and technical components, track record documentation and final acceptance certificates for project history, curriculum vitae and deployment plans for proposed personnel, service-level commitments and maintenance arrangements for after-sales support, delivery and implementation schedules, and where green or lifecycle elements are expressly stated criteria, environmental certifications and lifecycle cost computations that can be traced to the agency’s own evaluation language.
Where Preparation Meets Its Limits
The honest complication in the “preparation as advantage” framing is that MEARB’s flexibility is a feature that cuts both ways. Because weights and criteria are set by the procuring entity for each project, a submission optimized against one agency’s framework may need to be restructured significantly for another agency’s tender. There is no single national MEARB template that a bidder can prepare once and deploy everywhere.
There is also a transparency dimension worth noting. Advocates raised concerns during the legislative process that the discretion MEARB gives to agencies could be misused if evaluation criteria are poorly defined, unmeasurable, or drawn in ways that favor particular suppliers. The law addresses this through the publication requirement, criteria must be stated in the bidding documents and approved through the BAC process. But the quality of how criteria are drawn varies in practice.
This is actually a point where early engagement with the bidding documents creates an additional advantage. If the quality criteria in a tender are vague, unmeasurable, or appear to favor a specific brand or configuration, bidders have a formal window to raise this before submission. Clarification requests must generally be submitted at least ten (10) calendar days before the deadline, and supplemental bid bulletins must be issued at least seven calendar days before the deadline. After that window closes, the evaluation proceeds on the criteria as written. A bidder that identifies a problem in the bidding documents and raises it formally while the window is open is in a materially different position from one that notices the same problem and decides to submit anyway.
The Signatory and Disclosure Layer
No discussion of bid preparation under RA 12009 is complete without covering what the submission package itself requires beyond the technical and financial envelopes. The Omnibus Sworn Statement (OSS), which every bidder must submit, requires the signatory to declare under oath that they have authority to represent the bidder and to sign and execute the ensuing contract. That authority must be backed by a duly notarized special power of attorney, board or partnership resolution, or secretary’s certificate, as applicable.
The same OSS now covers compliance with the beneficial ownership disclosure requirements under Sections 81 and 82 of the law. Bidders must disclose the ultimate beneficial owner of the entity, consistent with what is on file with the SEC and maintained in PhilGEPS. Failure to comply with the ownership disclosure is a ground for automatic disqualification. A false beneficial ownership entry is a ground for blacklisting.
For companies whose corporate records, GIS filings, and beneficial ownership information need to be reviewed and kept consistent, the SEC GIS filing guide covers the relevant corporate compliance requirements that sit alongside the procurement submission. The two are connected: inconsistency between what a company has filed with the SEC and what it declares in its bid creates the precise kind of documentation gap that the new framework is designed to surface.
For logistics and supply chain companies bidding on government contracts, the same documentation discipline that applies to customs compliance applies here. Inconsistencies in how a company describes itself, its ownership, or its operations across different regulatory filings are among the most common sources of preventable problems in both contexts.
Where the Framework Sits as of Mid-2026
RA 12009 is in force and its IRR is effective. The GPPB standard forms for the New Government Procurement Act were approved in May 2025. Agencies are using MEARB on qualifying procurements, and real examples of how weights and criteria are being set are already visible in public bid notices.
What is still developing is the uniformity of implementation across agencies. Weights, minimum quality scores, the documentation expected to support each criterion, and the institutional sophistication with which sustainability and lifecycle criteria are applied vary meaningfully from one procuring entity to another. The GPPB is actively doing policy work on the methodology, and detailed lifecycle costing guidance remains forthcoming. Content that speaks of “emerging practice” will be more accurate than content that implies a single settled nationwide scoring methodology already exists.
For bidders, this means the landscape rewards those who engage carefully with each tender’s specific bidding documents rather than those who prepare a fixed general submission. It also means that the window to influence how criteria are defined, and to raise concerns about vague or inadequate criteria, is a real strategic tool rather than a procedural formality.
Companies participating in government procurement under the new framework, whether as first-time bidders, established suppliers preparing for a changed evaluation standard, or businesses with complex structures involving joint ventures or subcontracting, benefit from legal review at the points where the rules are most consequential. The 2026 SIPP’s investment priorities, which we have covered in detail, also point toward sectors where government procurement and private investment increasingly intersect, particularly in infrastructure, technology, and sustainability-related work.
AJA Law works with businesses preparing for government procurement, reviewing bid documentation, navigating MEARB evaluation requirements, and structuring submissions for complex tenders. If you are preparing to bid or reviewing how the new evaluation standard applies to your work, we are glad to assist. Contact us to discuss your situation.
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