Make lifestyle checks mandatory
Six big business and civil society groups—the Makati Business Club, Management Association of the Philippines, Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, Shareholders’ Association of the Philippines, Justice Reform Initiative, and Institute for Solidarity in Asia—have issued a call urging the Marcos administration to impose mandatory lifestyle checks on public officials, in light of the gargantuan government corruption revealed so far by the flood control projects scandal.
The groups argue that, while the Office of the Ombudsman has taken the salutary step of reversing the Martires-era restrictions on the disclosure of statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth of public officials, such disclosure is not enough. Officials may very well slap on deflated or imaginary figures in their SALNs to construct a picture of upright, even parsimonious lives, and the public would be none the wiser without a separate institutional mechanism to check the veracity of such assertions.
A mandatory lifestyle check will provide that additional step of verification, helping “uncover if declared wealth aligns with actual living standards,” the groups said in their statement. Without it, the SALNs would remain “symbolic records rather than effective tools against corruption.”
Presumed ill-gotten
Coincidentally, strong support for that argument comes from the recently released decision by the Supreme Court’s Third Division upholding the Sandiganbayan’s forfeiture of the properties, bank deposits, and investment accounts of former military comptroller Lt. Gen. Jacinto Ligot, including assets he had placed in the names of his widow, children, and relatives.
Citing Republic Act No. 1379, the Supreme Court affirmed in its ruling that wealth acquired by a public official while in government service that exceeds his or her lawful income is presumed ill-gotten and may be forfeited even if placed under the names of other individuals.
When Ligot was accused of corruption, the Ombudsman did not rely solely on his submitted SALNs to probe the allegations; it conducted a lifestyle check on the military official and his family and cross-checked such findings with Ligot’s SALNs from 1982 to 2003.
The Ombudsman found that Ligot’s declared assets were far from the actual extent of properties under his name and those of his family members. These included undeclared properties parceled out to his wife and children, and condominium units in Taguig and Makati registered to his sister and brother-in-law. All in all, some P135 million in funds and properties were found to have been illegally acquired, leading to a case for forfeiture filed before the Sandiganbayan in 2005.
Opulent lifestyles
It took two decades to resolve, but the Ligot case should now see a final resolution with the Supreme Court ruling upholding the Sandiganbayan’s forfeiture order. And it underscores an equally important fact: Lifestyle checks work.
Done properly, they can bring the thievery and corruption of government officials to public light—especially now, because, as the business groups pointed out, such lifestyle audits have become easier given the propensity of politicians’ families to display their wealth, travel, lavish spending, and other luxurious perks on social media, providing easy-to-trace digital footprints.
Way before cases were filed against now fugitive lawmaker Zaldy Co for his alleged role in billions of pesos of anomalous infrastructure “insertions” in the national budget, vigilant netizens were already documenting and asking questions about the opulent lifestyles of his family members and relatives’ children as seen in their social media posts. By the time the so-called “nepo babies” got the hint and shut down their social media pages, “receipts,” as it were, had been saved, and the subsequent seizure of Co’s fleet of airplanes add to the glaring evidence of their outsize wealth.
Radical moves
The Ombudsman, currently swamped with flood-control cases, may not have the wherewithal to conduct lifestyle checks on the hundreds of individuals expected to be hauled to court in this scandal. The Marcos administration, on the other hand, has ordered lifestyle checks in the executive department starting with the Department of Public Works and Highways, while noting that agencies themselves have the authority to conduct lifestyle audits within their respective jurisdictions.
That is still a patchwork arrangement, and leaving the critical task up to the agencies risks uneven, insufficient outcomes. President Marcos must heed the people’s call for radical moves to impose transparency in governance, and what’s needed most at this time, other than swift, sturdy cases in court against erring officials, is a specific body or agency tasked to conduct thorough, unsparing lifestyle probes on ALL government officials.
More than the SALNs, what will truly strike fear in the hearts of the corrupt is the sure outcome that their unexplained riches and ostentatious lifestyles will have to face public scrutiny.
