Yearender: COA exposes Dutertes’ predilection for confidential funds

MANILA, Philippines —  In the middle part of 2023, Filipinos were shocked and furious upon hearing reports that Vice President Sara Duterte spent P125 million in confidential funds (CF) in just 11 days.

The amount translates to around P11 million spent per day, as confirmed by the Commission on Audit (COA) during a plenary debate at the House of Representatives.

Duterte corrected the information, saying  the money was spent in 19 days or from Dec. 13 to 31, 2022.

Whether 11 or 19 days, the news was just as controversial as Congress did not allocate any CF to the Office of the Vice President (OVP) in 2022, as well as in prior years during the term of former vice president Leni Robredo.

The OVP’s P125 million in CF expenses was first revealed in the COA’s 2022 annual audit report (AAR) on the agency, which media outfits, including The STAR, reported in July.

The COA report did not mention where the OVP’s confidential funds were sourced. It was only revealed during a House hearing that the P125-million fund came from the Office of the President (OP).

In a letter on Aug. 22, 2022, Sara asked the Department of Budget and Management for a P403.46-million budget augmentation, supposedly to “ensure continuous operations of the OVP under the current year.”

At least three petitions are pending before the Supreme Court questioning the legality of the fund transfer from the OP to the OVP.

Petitioners prayed that the high tribunal would order Sara to return the P125 million to the treasury.

Congress stripped the OVP and the Department of Education (DepEd), which is also headed by Sara, of any CF for 2024.

It realigned the combined P650-million proposed CF of the OVP and DepEd to agencies involved in security and intelligence work.

Not only in OVP

A review of the COA’s previous annual audit reports (AARs) showed that Sara has been a major spender of confidential funds, even during her term as mayor of Davao City.

The COA’s AARs from 2016 to 2022 showed that the city government of Davao incurred confidential expenses amounting to hundreds of million of pesos from the time Sara succeeded her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, as Davao mayor after the May 9, 2016 elections.

The AARs showed the city government’s confidential expenses grew to P239 million in 2017, during the first full term of Sara as mayor, from P144 million in 2016.

The city’s confidential expenses ballooned to P420 million in 2018, to P460 million yearly from 2019 to 2022.

Sara was succeeded by her brother, Sebastian, as city mayor after the May 2022 elections.

Duterte, too

Meanwhile, COA’s previous annual financial reports (AFRs) on the national government revealed that Sara’s father, Rodrigo, also had a propensity for huge confidential spending.

The COA reports showed that it was during Duterte’s term that the OP’s confidential and intelligence fund (CIF) expenses escalated to billions of pesos.

The report said that during the shared term of Duterte and his predecessor, the late former president Benigno Simeon Aquino III in 2016, the OP only had P715.23 million in “confidential, intelligence and extraordinary (CIE) expenses,” representing 17.78 percent of the government’s P4.02-billion total for the year.

In 2017, during Duterte’s first full year in office, the OP’s CIE expenses increased by 252.33 percent or to P2.52 billion, representing 28.05 percent of the national government’s P8.97-billion total that year.

The OP’s CIE expenses slightly decreased to P2.51 billion and P2.41 billion in 2018 and 2019, respectively, before it ballooned to P4.57 billion in 2020, or an increase of 89.63 percent from the previous year.

It was in 2020 when the COA started separating in its annual financial reporting the government offices’ CIF expenses from their extraordinary and miscellaneous expenses.

The COA’s AFR for 2020 showed that of the P4.57-billion expenses incurred by the OP that year, P2.32 billion and P2.25 billion were for confidential and intelligence expenses, respectively.

In 2021, the last full year of Duterte in office, the OP incurred a total of P4.5 billion in CIF expenses, accounting for 49.55 percent of the P9.08-billion total CIF expenses of the national government.

The OP’s CIF spending remained the same in 2022, the shared term of Duterte and his successor President Marcos, who assumed office on June 30, 2022.