I spoke too
soon. I mean, I wrote too soon. Less than a month ago, the Congressional
Committee on Justice slammed the door on the Tamano supplement
to the original Pulido impeachment complaint.
The committee
did not follow proper procedures. It rejected the supplement without
even bothering to discuss the substantive contents with the members.
In a Congress noted for long-winded speeches and lengthy procedures,
the exercise took only two hours.
I wrote then
that refusal to allow legal redress to those who believed the
President should be held accountable for violation of the constitution
might signal that there is no hope in following legal procedures.
I warned that extralegal and extrajudicial action will become
more attractive to those who have given up hope in ever making
the President accountable for the increasing long list of issues
against her.
Last Thursday's
dog-day afternoon showed what happens when even legal alternatives
are not given a chance. Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV and Brig. Gen.
Danilo Lim have been roundly criticized by many for their so-called
caper. Without necessarily justifying their actions, the public
should not forget what drove them to seemingly desperate acts.
When open
violation of the simplest rules of accountability continue, when
cries for justice remain unheard, when open bribery continue unabated
and legal procedures are ignored with impunity, acts of defiance
will erupt at the most unpredictable times.
Oh
no, not again!
The dust has
hardly settled on the series of scandals implicating the Office
of the President. Still, another issue has erupted. This time,
it is on the Commission on Audit report for the year 2006.
The report
on the Office of the President includes a long list of infractions
which have serious implications for accountability.
Unliquidated
cash advances
While the
problem of unliquidated cash advances is common among government
agencies, the magnitude of the amounts involved is mind-boggling.
The fact that no less than the Office of the President is ignoring
a simple audit rule sends the wrong signals to the public and
gives a bad example to misbehaving public officials.
As of December
31, 2006, P615 million in cash advances remain unliquidated. The
rule is that accountable officials have to render reports on the
utilization of cash advances which are entrusted to them within
a year, or earlier. Everyone knows that when these accounts remain
unliquidated, total expenditures will tend to be understated while
the receivables account will be bloated.
For this infraction
alone, there is undercounting of expenditures to the tune of P615
million.
The more serious
problem, of course, is that of accountability. Public funds were
entrusted to public officials. It is their duty to report what
happened to these funds.
Expenses
from donations not in accordance with purpose
The Office
of the President receives donations from various sources for different
purposes. For example, it received P65.4 million in donations
for calamity victims, such as the Southern Leyte landslide, Typhoon
Milenyo victims, and relief and rehabilitation of Albay province,
as well as for socio-economic projects.
I wonder what
the "generous" donors will say if they learned that
a significant part of their donations went to burial expenses,
hotel expenses, maintenance of the Malacañang golf course,
summit conferences, and a vaguely worded "donation to foundation"?
Again, the
accountability rule here is very simple. Donations must be used
for the purposes intended for them.
One can perhaps
surmise that burial expenses were incurred to bury calamity victims.
However, it is difficult to identify calamity work with hotel
expenses, summits and donations to foundations.
As for maintenance
of the palace golf course, can a claim be made that sympathy for
victims of catastrophes is enhanced while an official is also
improving his golf handicap? Or that perhaps the serene ambiance
of a golf course is the perfect setting for reflections on how
to improve social services?
Abnormal
negative balances in cash accounts
The Commission
on Audit also reports that some cash accounts have "abnormal
negative balances" totaling P4.4 million. This is a contradiction
in terms. A cash account should have cash in it. One cannot have
"negative cash" unless the account is overdrawn. This
is not allowed especially for government offices.
More
analyses
One does not
need a fertile imagination to wonder if all the monies which are
unaccounted for, unliquidated and unrecorded would have funded
those frequent public distributions of cash to local officials
and congressmen.
Space limitations
do not allow us to share more details on the COA report. For more
analyses, please watch The Reporters' Notebook in GMA Channel
7. This is on Tuesday, December 4, after the evening news, Saksi.
(Ms. Leonor Briones is a former National Treasurer of the
Republic of the Philippines. She is currently teaching at the
University of the Philippines' National College of Public Administration
and Governance. She is also a co-convenor of Social Watch Philippines.
She also writes a column for the Business Mirror)
Other
Feature articles:
-
On Doing the Right Thing
- One
Statistics
-
From A Distance
-
Of Command and commandeered votes
-
Coming soon: young bureaucracy?
-
What to do the morning after the night before
-
Out Where the Country Begins
-
Questions Begging for Answers
-
Attaining the MDGS: Are We Really On Track?
-
The sky is not falling?
-
The Governance of Fraternities
-
Bribery, Debt and Borrowing
-
In Praise of the Senate
-
Recapturing the Power of the Purse
-
Making History Softly
Dog-day
afternoon