Foggy auditors, Whistleblowers, NGOs

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO

March L. Fianza

BAGUIO CITY -- The foggy Thursday afternoon last week made me and the taxi driver slip back to a time when summer days from 2pm till 4pm, a blanket of cool fog dramatically creeps in to cover the Baguio central business district, its main roads, the Melvin Jones football grounds, the Burnham Lake and the outskirts. At certain times, fog crawls in as early as 10 in the morning. The taxi driver, a Baguio-born Ilocano who traces his roots to La Union said the fog makes him remember the time when the air was a Pine-scented perfume spray from the sky. I told him, Baguio is incomparable as there is no other city in the Philippines that boasts of a weather that convincingly compels local and foreign tourists alike to revisit and keep on coming back. One could just imagine the picture of what Baguio was like under a blanket of fog at a time when there were no buildings to speak of. I wonder if tourism officials have the imagination and initiative to restore some little semblance of old Baguio, a good move towards PNoy’s dream of preserving the city to how it should appear.   

In Benguet, fog also creeps in especially on vegetable gardens in La Trinidad and Paoay, Atok. Except for Kennon road, fog crawls in along Halsema, Benguet-Viscaya, Naguillan, Philex and Marcos highways bringing road visibility to zero. On a foggy trip on any of these roads, a driver would rather pull over the side because the road itself and its centerline markers or cat’s eye reflectors would surely be concealed by the thick fog. If not, a driver resorts to tailing very closely the red lights of the vehicle ahead of him, an act described as “tailgating.” The problem with this is when the driver of the vehicle you are tailing cannot see the road under the thick fog and rams through a road protection barrier, he goes down the cliff – and you go down too.

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Who audits the audit? The old question that deserves a long-overdue answer rises again after the Commission on Audit (COA) came up with a report implicating congressmen and senators who allowed their Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) to be illegally used. Although, it is open secret that there are isolated cases where internal auditors collaborate with agency directors and share part of the money profited from a government project. Forgive the lack of familiarity about how government transactions are done these days, but what we were all made to believe as the function of the COA is for their officers to simply check if government funds are properly spent. What I understand is that every project funded by people’s taxes that would benefit the public has to be audited before during and after implementation.

True, while lawmakers help identify projects based on the requests of their constituents, and go to the extent of endorsing people who would undertake the project, the auditors should always be around. In the case of the senators and congressmen who “endorsed” their PDAF to be illegally disbursed or worst, to be pocketed, the auditors had the duty to stop the deals from being executed. Unfortunately and admittedly, the auditors were not around when the accumulated P10Bn PDAF was slowly going, going, gone. As I write, there is a standing clamor for COA chair Grace Pulido Tan to resign or be impeached. They ask, shouldn’t auditors be the guardians of people’s monies and see that these are spent properly? As usual, auditors deliberately disappear everytime government projects are about to be “unimplemented.”

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 Poor whistleblowers! As I watch TV and listen to all sides of the Napoles rip-off story, it dawns upon me that those who are supposed to be rewarded for bravely revealing the truth about corruption in their workplaces and setting aside the dangers that may come upon them and their families, are beginning to be thelosers in games staged on uneven playing fields. In PNoy’s supposedly “matuwid na daan” administration, it is still “baku-bakungdaan” for them. Take the case of Janet Lim-Napoles who has become the unwanted symbol of the pork that is chopped and shared out like “watwat” in a canyao. When she “surrendered” to PNoy, the spirit of honest Filipinos who pay their taxes with their blood, sweat and tears shot up quite high. They thought that the beginning of an end to corruption was in the horizon.

But a few days later, true colors appeared. Napoles was not the ordinary swindler that people thought would be treated like any other criminal. She was turning into something that was to make her conspiring lawmakers and even PNoy very nervous with what she was going to say. And so, she was not allowed to be interviewed and was transferred to a prison with no walls. She was almost free and could do anything inside Erap’s Fort Sto. Domingo detention park, except that guards saw to it that no one visited her except her lawyer, her family and a few government officials with whom she has allegedly struck a deal. For the whistleblowers, they are starting to feel like they will become jigsaw pieces that will have to fit according to the design that a long-drawn pork barrel trial with no ending will become. For how long will the whistleblowers be whistleblowers? No one exactly knows. It depends on how good the “deal” between Napoles, Malacanang and congress is. 

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I first heard about NGOs or non-government organizations in the early 80s. They are very similar to the kind of NGOs that are allegedly linked to pork barrel icon Napoles, or the ones allegedly founded by her. The NGOs that I first knew were the ones that were linked to millions of dollars solicited from abroad. However, they perform their trade differently from the way the NGOs that Napoles founded carry out their affairs. The difference is that the NGOs founded in the 80s only pocket funds donated by wealthy governments in Europe that are intended to uplift the living conditions of indigenous peoples, the urban poor, women’s organizations, etc. Napoles’ NGOs on the other hand, perform the opposite – they only pocket the people’s taxes. What makes them comparable is that both kinds of NGOs are “legally authorized thieves.” – ozram.666@gmail.com