Clear pattern

Vice President Sara Duterte —GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

Picture this: A company entrusts a huge amount of money to a top officer, to be spent for various official needs. The officer, for purposes of transparency, is required to account for the fund’s disbursement by submitting the proper paper trail and documentation.

In Year 1, a number of significant transactions made by the officer are disallowed, deemed irregular, because they violated the terms of where the money could be spent and the supporting documents submitted were incomplete, or worse, had multiple deficiencies including possible fraud and deception. In Year 2, yet more transactions are flagged, essentially for the same reasons.

The officer somehow stays on, but in Year 4 comes another batch of suspicious transactions. The overall impression becomes inescapable: The officer simply lacks the sense of responsibility, integrity, and discipline needed to perform the delicate task of handling company funds.

In the corporate setup, a scenario like this is easily resolved. The moment an officer is found, through proper investigation, to have engaged in deceitful behavior, such as forging signatures or altering official documents to cover up illegal transactions or harmful negligence, any upright company would boot that employee out and institute damage claims against him or her.

Multiple notices

Now, apply this scenario to the realm of government. Vice President Sara Duterte is currently undergoing an impeachment trial for, among other things, hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential funds allocated to her office that were then found to have been spent in the most unusual ways. Duterte, as the nation’s second highest official, was entrusted with a trove of taxpayer money for very specific objectives. When it came time to accounting for how the money was spent, the Commission on Audit (COA) revealed, through multiple notices of disallowances, that the Office of Vice President (OVP) had repeatedly used up the money in whatever way it wanted, without following prescribed government standards.

For instance, COA auditor Xylene Mae del Campo testified before the Senate impeachment court that Duterte is liable, as the agency head, for the OVP’s irregular use of P73.28 million in confidential funds in 2022. COA disallowed the funds’ use for supposed evidence-gathering and surveillance activities absent supporting documents. A portion of the money also went to purchasing tables, chairs, printers, desktop computers—items unrelated to confidential activities and lacking receipts and invoices.

Betrayal of public trust

The OVP’s total P125 million in confidential funds for Dec. 21 to 31, 2022 were not only spent in just 11 days, but their liquidation documents also contained a particularly startling detail: acknowledgment receipts for purported payments of rewards to such recipients as Mary Grace Piattos, Mico Harina, Beverly Claire Pampano, and other names not present in the national registry, according to the statistics office.

The following year, 2023, would reveal even more anomalous spending of confidential funds amounting to P375 million, which the COA disallowed on similar grounds: The spending was not justified, lacked verifiable documentation, and was disbursed by unauthorized personnel.

Two strikes, and the pattern is clear: The OVP is at best careless in handling the people’s money—unable to harness the lawyers, accountants, and civil servants in its employ to prepare thorough, irrefutable documentation of its spending—and at worst engaged in what could be seen as the misuse of public funds. The possibility of graft, malversation of public funds, even plunder raises the far more fundamental issue of the betrayal of public trust, which goes to the very heart of the Vice President’s fitness for office.

Red flags

And even as Duterte is already in the dock for those two cases, which would already require the VP and her staff members to return to government coffers some P448 million, COA is raising more questions, this time over activities involving almost P168 million in public funds spent in 2025. The red flags are strikingly familiar: Once again, the OVP is being called out for deficiencies or inconsistencies in the documentation of relief efforts it supposedly undertook last year.

In COA’s dry wording, “These deficiencies reduced assurance on the completeness, reliability, and verifiability of relief distribution records and weakened controls over relief operations.” In plainer words, what they say is that Duterte’s office, even as late as last year after having been repeatedly called out by the state audit office for its muddled, disorganized reporting, was still failing to account properly for its use of public funds.

How many chances should the No. 2 official of the land get for failing to follow the most basic government rules that she had vowed to uphold upon assuming office? And how much of that seeming disregard for the law can the country tolerate, before it further corrodes institutional accountability?