House panel rebuffs ombudsman, retains COA initial audit report

MANILA, Philippines — The House appropriations committee will retain the regular publication of the initial audit observation memorandum of the Commission on Audit (COA) despite a request from Ombudsman Samuel Martires to do away with it. 

Marikina Rep. Stella Luz Quimbo, panel senior vice chair, said that the committee decided to continue the publication of COA reports, and that only two changes have been made to the proposed P5.7-trillion national budget for 2024. 

Quimbo said these changes included the removal of the requirement for Congress to submit reports to the executive department, and the two-year leeway given to agencies to spend their maintenance and other operating expenses – from the previous year and a half. 

Martires on Monday asked lawmakers to remove the publication requirement of the initial audit observation memorandum of the COA for each government agency to prevent confusion. 

He cited a case wherein the COA issued an AOM to a P10-million project, which makes people think of innuendoes that the concerned public official may have enriched himself, when in truth, the official’s only fault was his failure to submit the necessary receipts. 

Quimbo confirmed that the panel also decided to keep the confidential and intelligence funds of agencies that have been allotted in the approved proposed 2024 national budget hearings.

The government is requesting P5.277 billion in intelligence funds and P4.864 billion in confidential expenses under the proposed General Appropriations Act. 

Panel chair Rep. Zaldy Co of Ako Bicol party-list said the Department of Budget and Management has given assurance that the Office of the President did not subvert the House’s power over the purse when it released contingency funds to the Office of Vice President (OVP) Sara Duterte last year.

“While it is understandable that the release of funds to the OVP may be perceived as a transfer, the same was not technically so, for such release was funded from the Contingent Fund under the FY 2022 GAA and not from the budget of the OP,” Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman told Co in a letter.

The amount of P125 million is the larger part of the total P221.42 million released to the OVP and sourced from the Contingent Fund under last year’s General Appropriations Act approved by Congress.

Pangandaman said the release of funds to the OVP “was not an augmentation or transfer of funds from the OP,” an action declared in 2014 as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in a ruling penned by then justice Lucas Bersamin, now executive secretary, over the Araullo versus Aquino case. 

The ruling on the Araullo case declared unconstitutional the act of withdrawing unobligated allotments from implementing agencies, declaring them as savings, then transferring those savings to offices outside the executive department to fund projects not covered by the GAA because it oversteps the power of Congress to appropriate public funds.