The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said that the overwhelming majority of recipients of intelligence or confidential funds from the Office of the Vice President (OVP) do not exist, or at least there is no record of their existence.
Vice-president Sara Duterte-Carpio has been under fire for her failure to account for intelligence and confidential funds, both as VP and as Education secretary. She was secretary of Education until she resigned earlier this year.
The House of Representatives stated over the weekend that evidence from the PSA indicated that the receipts submitted by the OVP had been “manufactured.”
Manila Rep. Joel Chua, head of the House committee on Good Government and Public Accountability said the statement from PSA “leaves little doubt.”
Chua argued that if the names cannot be found in the civil registry, “it strongly suggests they do not exist. They may have been manufactured to justify the disbursement of confidential funds.”
Duterte-Carpio had initially been unwilling to submit the names of the recipients of the funds but later gave the House a list of names that appeared short on details or were incomplete.
One of the first names she gave the House – Mary Grace Piattos – appeared to be a joke, combining the name of a popular cake shop along with a snack food.
The PSA confirmed that Mary Grace Piattos does not exist, having no record of birth or even school records to speak of.
Lawmakers in the House concluded that the OVP had concocted a scheme to use fictitious names to justify its spending.
Claire Dennis Mapa, PSA undersecretary, said they were unable to find a birth, marriage or death certificate under the name Mary Grace Piattos.
Chua said the findings raised a critical question: “If the recipients don’t exist, where did the money go? This is not just a clerical error; this points to a deliberate effort to misuse public funds.”
It is not just the OVP which has not accounted for millions of pesos in both confidential and intelligence funds
Duterte-Carpio (who headed the Department of Education from June 2022 until she resigned in July this year) submitted to the House Blue Ribbon committee a list of 677 names of supposed fund recipients but 405 of those names have no records with the PSA.
Chua’s committee asked the PSA to verify the supposed OVP recipients after the Authority submitted its findings on the DepEd list of recipients.
The OVP’s list of recipients was also submitted to the Commission on Audit to justify VP Duterte-Carpio’s spending of PHP500 million in confidential funds from December 2022 to September 2023.
It was then that nearly two-thirds of the recipient names for OVP confidential funds – 1,322 out of 1,992 – were found to have no existing birth records in the PSA’s database.
The PSA placed 670 names under the “most likely matched” category where they either had namesakes or had more than one date of birth.
The OVP said the funds were used to pay for rewards for informants, safe house rentals, travel expenses, medicine, and food aid, among others.
It is worth noting that Davao City, which has been ruled by the Dutertes for decades, has been red-flagged on several occasions for hiring suspected “15/30” government workers, who receive salaries every 15th and end of the month for doing little to no work.
The practice is not unique to Davao, however, as a showbiz figure turned politician in Quezon City has been convicted of having scores of 15/30 workers under his office’s payroll. —BETING LAGYO DOLOR (Contributing Editor)
