MANILA, Philippines – House lawmakers on Tuesday, November 5, flagged “fabricated” acknowledgment receipts (ARs) related to the use of confidential funds by Vice President Sara Duterte’s office, citing issues in the receipts such as identical ink, incorrect dates, and alleged non-existent names.
This was bared during the resumption of the House committee on good governance probe into alleged misuse of funds by the Vice President.
1-Rider Representative Rodge Gutierrez, based on his office’s research, said that approximately 158 ARs (acknowledgment receipts), amounting to P23.8 million, had incorrect dates. These documents, which were supposed to reflect December 2022, were mistakenly dated December 2023. Gutierrez expressed concern over the issue, describing it as “strange” that such a date error occurred repeatedly across so many records.
“We would understand if the typographical errors happened once or twice. For supposedly acknowledgment receipts which came from different sources, this should be different people issuing this, right? For 158 people to commit the same mistake? Is that acceptable?” Gutierrez asked the Commission on Audit’s representative Gloria Camora.
Camora replied that Office of the Vice President’s (OVP) explanation was that this was due to “inadvertently typographical errors.” She noted that this was among the reasons why COA issued a notice of disallowance to OVP. (READ: COA disallows P73M in OVP confidential funds for 2022)
“This was a mistake that was committed after the fact, after the Audit Observation Memorandum (AOM) and after the notice of suspension when they were rushing to comply with ‘yung mga butas po na lahat ng COA (the loopholes in the COA report). I think this is something that the committee should consider,” Gutierrez said.
Identical ink? Fabricated receipts?
Antipolo 2nd District Representative Romeo Acop also flagged his office’s observation of the use of identical ink and handwriting in the ARs submitted by the OVP to COA. He noted that there were 302 ARs that had unreadable names and five repeated names.
“Mr. Chair I would just like to manifest that all these acknowledgement receipts are under the names of different persons. If we look at these ten, the names and signatures of different persons appear to be written with the same pen whether distinct or different dates. I think this is highly irregular. Bilang ako, isang imbestigador (With me, being an investigator).” Acop said.
Meanwhile, Quezon 2nd District Representative Jay Jay Suarez described the “fabricated” ARs as reminiscent of the pork barrel scheme uncovered a decade ago. “Maraming acknowledgement receipts na ‘di umano fabricated, ‘di umano, gawa-gawa at parang hindi po may paliwanag kung paano po ito tumutugma base po doon sa pondong nailaan para sa kanya,” he said.
(There are many acknowledgment receipts that are allegedly fabricated, supposedly made up, and it seems there is no explanation for how these match with the funds allocated for them.)
“Ang daming red flags na nakita ng committee. Una signature lang. Pangalawa, migrant beneficiaries (The committee saw a lot of red flags. First, just the signature. Second, the migrant beneficiaries). When I say migrant beneficiaries, they receive funds from the confidential funds of the DepEd and they receive funds from the confidential funds of the Office of the Vice President. There are also instances where individuals that received many times from the confidential funds,” Suarez added.
The OVP has yet to release a statement about the matter. We will update this story once we receive their reply.
Duterte, as well as her staff, again snubbed the House probe. In a statement, the Vice President maintained that the ongoing probe is “not in aid of legislation.” – Rappler.com
