COA personnel committed financial management errors

MANILA, Philippines - Personnel of the Commission on Audit (COA) were found to have committed various financial management errors in 2012, including failing to dispose of unserviceable property.

State auditors said COA must correct and deal with salary overpayments, accounting errors, and failure to adequately ensure government properties in the provinces.

The 2012 report released recently said non-disposal of COA’s unserviceable properties in Cagayan Valley, Calabarzon and Bicol worth over P2.3 million had deprived the government of miscellaneous income from the sale of the assets.

State auditors reminded concerned COA officials that when government property has become unserviceable they must be destroyed if found worthless or sold at public auction to the highest bidder if they can still be sold.

“The non-disposal of the said unserviceable properties resulted to its further deterioration and reduction of its saleable value to the disadvantage of the government,” the report said.

In SOCCSKSARGEN, government property with a total value of P11.8 million was inadequately provided with insurance coverage due to failure of the Property Unit to submit the updated inventory report, state auditors said.

The report said in Western Visayas, salary overpayments of more than P2 million arising from Leave Without Pay (LWOP) were not promptly deducted or collected, depriving COA of additional resources that can be used for operations.

“Had these overpayments been promptly collected, these could have been used in more important projects of the Commission,” the report said.

“Consider deleting from the payroll the salaries of personnel who consistently incur LWOP and pay their salaries through disbursement voucher to prevent the accumulation of salary overpayments.”

COA to charge gov’t officials

Meanwhile, COA is set to file charges against government officials whose agencies have failed to comply with their directive to settle unliquidated advances over the years.

COA chairperson Grace Pulido Tan told senators she saw billions in unliquidated advances in different government agencies when she assumed office some two years ago.

She immediately initiated a final demand for all of the agencies with unliquidated advances, particularly those that have remained unsettled for the past 10 to 15 years, she added.

Tan said many agencies still failed to liquidate their cash advances despite the notice from COA.

“So that is what we did,” she said.

“I came out, I said this is going to be a final demand, whoever has cash advances in his hands must liquidate already.

“We have a provision of criminal law that when somebody is given a cash advance, and he’s not able to liquidate that within the prescribed period and within demand there is already a presumption in law that that money was malversed.” 

Tan said COA has already prepared a list of individuals and organizations that were not able to comply with their directive to liquidate their cash advances within the prescribed period and published this in a newspaper.

COA is now expediting the process of preparing the appropriate cases, which they would submit to the Office of the Ombudsman, she added.

Tan said the problem with the unliquidated advances is that the agencies concerned were not doing anything about it and so the amounts have accumulated to over a billion pesos in several cases.

“There are agencies, one agency would have a billion or so in unliquidated cash advances. It’s also possible,” she said.

Tan said the agencies concerned were given up to 90 days upon receipt of their audit findings to liquidate their cash advances.

 â€œWe have been making demands year in and year out,” she said. – With Marvin Sy