Assessing Local Government Engineers’ Understanding of Legal and Regulatory Frameworks in Philippine Building and Permit Processes

The study assessed the level of legal and regulatory compliance in building- and permit-related procurement and project implementation among engineers and technical personnel in key offices of LGU Cabanatuan City, Philippines, using a descriptive quantitative design and a structured Likert-scale survey of 30 respondents. Results showed generally high compliance in knowledge of laws, internal controls, and procurement capability enhancement, but only moderate compliance in transparency, conflict of interest management, monitoring, and continuous improvement, indicating a predominantly procedural and inward-focused compliance culture. At the same time, challenges were found to be systemic and highly challenging in documentation quality, personnel workload, training, internal systems, feedback mechanisms, and conflict management, while support services and some aspects of process timeliness were rated as challenging, revealing substantial operational and integrity constraints that undermine effective implementation despite high legal awareness. Correlation analysis indicated only a few significant relationships between compliance dimensions and challenges specifically, internal controls with personnel workload, procurement capability enhancement with internal systems, conflict of interest management with training, and monitoring with process timelines suggesting that institutional arrangements and systems, rather than legal knowledge alone, are most closely linked to day-to-day difficulties. The study concludes that enhancing legal and regulatory compliance in LGU Cabanatuan City requires prioritizing improvements in digital and integrated systems, documentation management, staffing and workload balancing, structured and technically focused training, strengthened conflict-of-interest safeguards, and robust monitoring, feedback, and continuous-improvement mechanisms that translate audit and field insights into sustained process reforms.