Palace wants lifestyle check on PNP execs

MANILA, Philippines - Corrupt policemen beware.

Malacañang is supporting a plan of the interior department to work with the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) in conducting lifestyle checks on police officials, with a Palace official saying yesterday that tax chief Kim Henares “can work fast.”

Deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte told state-run radio dzRB that the checks would be confidential and the results known only when cases are filed by the BIR.

Valte was asked to react to Interior Secretary Mar Roxas’ statement that he is planning to coordinate with the BIR for possible lifestyle checks on members of the Philippine National Police (PNP).

Roxas said the lifestyle checks aim to weed out corrupt PNP members and make them accountable for their misdeeds.

He floated the possibility of a lifestyle check in the wake of recent criminal incidents involving law enforcers, including a robbery along EDSA in Mandaluyong which was caught on video and went viral online early this month.

PNP chief Director General Alan Purisima has ordered an investigation into a “quota system” that reportedly forces police officers to collect weekly bribes from illegal activities on behalf of higher officials.

Purisima ordered the probe to determine the veracity of the information given by a ranking police officer, said Chief Superintendent Reuben Theodore Sindac, PNP Public Information Office (PIO) director.

“This is a serious allegation. We should check first the validity but at the same time when the reports came out, there was an instruction to establish the validity and veracity of his allegations,” said Sindac.

Sindac, however, pointed out that the ranking police officer was not identified in the news report.

“We will take it at face value. First of all the officer who revealed the quota system was not named,” Sindac said. 

He said the PNP would conduct counter intelligence operations to check the reliability of anonymous source.

The police source had revealed that the quota system on the weekly bribes that higher police officials receive and the proliferation of illegal drugs are the roots of corruption in the PNP.

The allegation was made amid reports that 12 policemen were linked to the EDSA gun-poking incident, which turned out to be an extortion scheme locally called “hulidap.”

Eight of the 12 policemen have so far been accounted for while the rest remain at large.

The source had claimed that if the police leadership really wants to get rid of corruption and scalawags in the PNP they should start cleaning their own ranks.

“They should stop the quota on bribes being demanded by higher officials to their subordinates and closely monitor the activities of police officers assigned at anti-drug units,” said the source, who holds a sensitive position in one of the police districts in Metro Manila.

Quota, in police parlance, is the weekly money that lower-ranked officers are supposed to give to their superiors in exchange for their positions.

Sources told The STAR that the bribe quota ranges from P3,000 to P7,000 a week, depending on the assignment or unit of police officers.

He said the quota system varies from district to district and from police posts but there are always “bagmen,” police officers that handle the collection and distribution.

Police officials have practiced the quota system for decades now and Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Roxas II should now stop the scheme to purge scalawags from the PNP.

A source said that the quota system is hard to prove since erring policemen abide by a “code of silence.”

Roxas had urged the police sources to “surface and identify the higher police officials involved in the quota system.

“It is next to impossible. Nobody among the lower ranking policemen in his right mind, would speak up against their superiors who are involved in the quota system as it would mean a hard life for him and his family,” the source added.

He noted that whistle-blowers are only popular while the scandals are investigated in Congress but when the congressional hearings are over, the witnesses are left to fend for themselves.

Roxas said the department could not yet start an investigation without any witness coming out and revealing what he knew about the issue.  With Non Alquitran