To consider a P25,000 extra allowance from Vice President Sara Duterte as a “minimal” amount is baffling. It’s even insulting to diligent workers whose monthly take-home pay is much less than that.
But in the Office of the Vice President (OVP), where P125 million was spent in 11 days, including P250,000 for an overnight rental of a safe house, a P25,000 monthly allowance on top of the regular salary and allowances may indeed be a “minimal” amount.
From a vice president who could buy “only chocolates and ice cream” with P1,500 at a convenience store, P25,000 may be a small amount. She had complained about the high prices of basic goods, that with P1,500 on hand, she could no longer buy rice and corned beef, didn’t she?
What rice variety was she looking for, and what brands of chocolates and ice cream was she buying with P1,500? Just recently, I bought good quality black rice at P600 for 5 kilograms. That means that my P1,500 can buy 12.5 kg of high-quality, healthy rice. But the vice president preferred to get chocolates and ice cream. Did her go-to convenience store run out of healthy options that can fill the stomach and she was left with only chocolates and ice cream? That says a lot about the vice president’s spending priorities.
If that was how she was spending her personal money, what can you expect when she has billions of pesos in public funds at her disposal? And it would appear that her understanding of confidential funds is that it is something she could spend just for anything she wanted because it is not subject to rigid auditing anyway.
She had P612.5 million in confidential funds from December 2022 to September 2023 lodged in the OVP and the Department of Education (DepEd), which she occupied concurrently until June 2024, when she resigned as education secretary.
Based on audit reports scrutinized by members of the House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability, Duterte’s spending of confidential funds was not only improper but shockingly scandalous or even plunderous.
During the Nov. 5 hearing of the committee, 1-Rider Party-list Rep. Ramon Rodrigo “Rodge” Gutierrez cited 158 acknowledgment receipts (ARs) that were used to justify the OVP’s disbursement of P23.8 million confidential funds in late 2022 were not only dated incorrectly but also bore glaring anomalies.
Gutierrez said he found it odd that 158 of the ARs were dated as being received in December 2023 instead of December 2022. The OVP no longer had confidential funds to spend in December 2023. One receipt was dated Nov. 27, 2022, acknowledging payment of P150,000 for “payment of reward (medicines).” The OVP did not have confidential funds yet in November 2022. The first check of P125 million came from the contingent fund of the Office of the President and was released in December 2022.
“Wala pa pong confidential funds, they’re already coming out with acknowledgement receipts,” Gutierrez noted.
Gloria Camora, the leader of the Commission on Audit (CoA) unit that audited the OVP’s confidential funds in 2023, said Duterte’s office had attributed the date discrepancies to “inadvertent clerical or typographical errors.”
“We would understand if the typographical error happens once or twice, and for a single individual to make this mistake multiple times… [But] for 158 people to make the same mistake? Is that an acceptable margin of error?” Gutierrez pointed out.
The timing of the error, he observed, coincided suspiciously with the CoA’s notice of suspension to the OVP in December 2023. That was when the OVP should have submitted its second batch of receipts to the CoA.
Antipolo City Rep. Romeo Acop, a former police officer, identified another red flag in the ARs — at least 10 were signed by different persons on various dates but used identical ink.
“These acknowledgment receipts are under the names of different persons, but if you look at it, the signatures appear to be written with the same pen,” Acop said.
In last month’s hearing of the committee, the lawmakers found that the DepEd used certifications from the Philippine Army to justify its use of P15.54 million confidential funds supposedly for the conduct of Youth Leadership Summits. None of the DepEd funds was spent on the Army’s activities.
No wonder the vice president had asked the committee to stop its investigation just when it was starting. The anomalous schemes discovered in the last three hearings bring to mind Duterte’s statement when she was mayor of Davao City in 2019. She said honesty should not be an election issue because “everybody lies anyway.”
Last September, she declared that “there was no misuse of any funds” in response to a privilege speech by Manila Rep. Rolando Valeriano on the questionable transactions in the OVP and DepEd.
Duterte dismissed the legislative probe as part of an “unending political attack” by the activist Makabayan bloc of lawmakers, Speaker Martin Romualdez and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
On Sept. 18, the vice president said the inquiry was “not about misused funds, accountability, or governance,” but it was intended to discredit her and to gather evidence for a planned impeachment case “to prevent” her from participating in “future political contests.”
Whether or not the congressional probe has something to do with the 2028 elections becomes irrelevant when so many questions involving millions of pesos in public funds remain unanswered.
With the glaring proof of anomalous transactions in both the OVP and the DepEd, the vice president should prove that the acknowledgment receipts were not bogus. She should stop the lies and justify that she judiciously spent the P612.8 million confidential funds if she wants to escape being charged with plunder.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
This column also appeared in The Manila Times.
