THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS Was it a special audit hijacked to be a demolition job? The biggest flaw of the Commission on Audit’s special report on the use of Congress pork-barrel funds is the fact that it had to rely almost entirely on documents under the control of the Budget department headed by President Aquino’s ideologue and strategist Florencio Abad. As the COA report itself complained: “The DBM could not provide the Team, despite repeated requests, with complete schedule of releases per legislator from PDAF for soft projects…” (page 5). This means that not all senators and legislators were actually audited, since the DBM did not provide data for everyone. While the COA did not specify which senators’ pork-barrel use the DBM provided documents on, this can be extracted from the report’s Table 4, entitled “Releases from PDAF. . . from CYs 2007 to 2009 Per Legislator as Provided by the DBM and Gathered by the Team” (emphasis mine). That is, the DBM provided documents on the pork barrel releases, only for the members of Congress who are listed in the table and only for the amounts indicated. These documents included such details as the implementing agencies and the NGOs to which the pork barrel funds were directed. The COA of course did its own research by investigating for instance whether the NGOs referred to in these documents as having received pork barrel funds were genuine or ghost entities. Only two senators are known, and have publicly declared, that they had never touched their pork barrel allocations: Senators Joker Arroyo and Panfilo Lacson. Unless other senators claim that they also have not asked for any pork barrel, we have to assume that the rest received their full allocation of P200 million annually, totaling P600 million for the years 2007, 2008 and to 2009, covered by the audit. manilatimes.net/was-it-a-special-audit-hijacked-to-be-a-demolition-job/36319/
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 02:57:03 +0000
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