2 failing agencies abolished at last

The 2011 national budget proposes no allocations for the Presidential Anti-Smuggling Group and the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission. In effect the P-Noy admin is abolishing the two Malacañang offices starting January. Well and good, for they have been malfunctioning anyway.

The PASG is an aberration. Then-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had formed it in 2006 for a specific purpose. No, it had nothing to do with usual technical smugglers who misclassify and undervalue cargo; those were already in the Customs’ crosshairs (to extort from?). The PASG was to run after two smuggler-siblings, of which the female had a special relationship with a Palace heavyweight. A strong-willed President, Arroyo did not have to form an exclusive unit to neutralize the siblings. In fact, a Manila court had ruled that only Customs created by law, not PASG created by executive order, had authority to confiscate contraband. But then, there were complications.

The PASG soon lost sight of its objective. It began duplicating Customs in raiding warehouses for supposed hot goods that turned out to be legit. Officers were reported to also mimic Customs in setting monthly payolas to clear contraband from the ports. The PASG simply has to go as a crooked organization.

The PAGC, meanwhile, has deteriorated from an anti-corruption into a pro-corruption agency. President Fidel Ramos had rejuvenated it in 1992 to assist the Ombudsman. But while the latter, an independent constitutional body, could investigate any of the 1.5 million public servants, the PAGC was to concentrate on the 7,000 or so presidential appointees. That is, cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries, presidential advisers and consultants, officers and directors of government corporations and financial institutions, and heads of state universities and colleges. Ramos’s PAGC chairman was Eufemio Domingo, once chairman of the Commission on Audit. Domingo not only gathered evidence to fire shady appointees, he also commissioned studies on how to fight sleaze. Among his memorable but unimplemented proposals was a shame campaign. Lamenting that Filipinos hate graft but love to have grafters grace their baptismals and weddings, he suggested that they instead publicly ostracize government thieves. Arroyo’s latest appointments to the PAGC could not live up to the high standards set by Domingo.

Arroyo’s latest PAGC chairwoman had appointed her son as executive assistant. One can say it’s perfectly legal, since she needed an aide of her confidence in such a sensitive position. But then, she also placed the son’s fiancée as PAGC executive director, the highest staff position. The fiancée in turn hired her sister and friends, although unqualified, to high-paying PAGC positions. The chairwoman also appointed to the agency the sons and daughters of close friends. Allegedly she also assigned some of the staff to personal duty in her houses in the city and province. Too, the son and fiancée used the office as kennel for their pet dogs.

Arroyo’s PAGC chief withstood the exposé by sobbing in public that she meant no harm. Before her patron Arroyo stepped down last June 30, the chairwoman got herself appointed to the National Police Commission. From the PAGC she placed six others in the agency that promotes good cops and sacks bad ones. She did not lift a finger when Arroyo frenziedly stuffed the bureaucracy with midnight appointees during the election ban. She was herself a midnight appointee.

Last-minute postings were not the only anomalies to escape the PAGC’s attention. The agency also looked the other way as the heads and directors of government corporations and financial institutions anomalously increased their own pay and perks. Arroyo early in her tenure had issued an administrative order for her appointees to exercise austerity. She also forbade them from collecting fees and bonuses more than double the monthly pay of a cabinet secretary. But they did anyway, and the PAGC let them. That was how, on top of monthly per diems of P94,000 each, Malacañang-appointed trustees in the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System were able to award themselves annual bonuses equivalent to an extra 25 months’ pay. Each also worth P94,000, the bonuses included those for the weeks before and after Christmas, plus one for Christmas day. Separate were the mid-year and yearend bonuses. They invented all sorts of bonuses, including one paid on the anniversary of the MWSS privatization in May 1995.

The PAGC also let appointee trustees in the Social Security System to pocket millions of pesos in directors’ bonuses and options in private firms in which the provident mutual fund has bought shares.

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“Life does not move any faster just because you are impatient to get going.” Shafts of Light, Fr. Guido Arguelles, SJ

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