Serious credibility issues are now being raised against the Commission on Audit (CoA) after it came out with a very arbitrary special report on the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) which was mainly trained on certain members of the opposition in the Senate. A former state auditor who was falsely accused of a crime by the ruling power at the CoA which is the tandem of CoA chairman Grace Pulido-Tan and the controversial acting Commissioner Heidi Mendoza, alleged that Mendoza’s masterpiece which was the PDAF special report suffered too many objectivity flaws to be considered a fair audit. To sum up, retired state auditor Arturo Bersana said that the PDAF deviated from the usual CoA audit process and that the five senators who were its obvious targets were victims of injustice. Bersana detailed that Mendoza has been undertaking the PDAF special report project, which only she and Tan were privy to, leaving out from the CoA loop a third commissioner, Rowena Guanzon, who is also an appointee of Noynoy similar to Tan and Mendoza. Based on Bersana’s CoA insider account, Mendoza was given blanket authority over the special project on the PDAF and nearly all aspects of key CoA operations since last May. He said Tan issued a memorandum last May 10 stating that Mendoza shall have oversight of the national government, local government, and corporate sectors and the international audit and relations office giving Mendoza sole and exclusive jurisdiction over the audit of departments, bureaus and offices; provinces, cities, municipalities and barangays; and government-owned and controlled corporations, commissions and authorities. Mendoza shall be brought to her attention through the SOUP network. SOUP is the acronym for: sector — referring to national, local or corporate; office — referring to office in the sector; unit — or the audit unit in the office in particular sector; and personnel — who are the audit personnel in a unit in an office in a particular sector. SOUP according to Bersana is an internal spy network established by the Tan-Mendoza tandem. Since 2011, as provided in the circular, only Mendoza and Tan have direct line and functional authority over all CoA personnel in the audit of national, local and corporate sector. Even Guanzon would have to go through Mendoza to reach CoA personnel and with due notice to Tan to inquire on any CoA audit including the PDAF which falls under the national government sector. Mendoza then announced in Washington D.C. that CoA has put in place mechanisms to examine the pork barrel allocations of members of Congress but which since 2011 no discussions were ever made in the Commission Proper, that included Guanzon, about the audit mechanisms that she announced before the World Bank in the Washington DC forum. Only Mendoza, thus, had full knowledge of the audit of the pork barrel of members of Congress and the release of the reports thereon. Mendoza also exercises full control over the field audit personnel in her oversight function mainly through the SOUP network which Bersana said in practice is a spying device enabling her and Tan to get reports from all auditing units. The revelations of Bersana point to the PDAF special report project being undertaken solely between Tan and Mendoza which was made to look official through the painstaking work of CoA personnel who acted solely on the direction of the two officials. Reviewing the special report on the PDAF, CoA did come up with very detailed reports on the manner at which implementing agencies transferred funds to apparent bogus non-government organizations. The work of Mendoza likely involved the detailing of the PDAF allocations to members of Congress including the target senators which included obvious blunders such as the supposed P3 billion worth of PDAF attributed to former Compostela Valley Rep. Manuel “Way Kurat” Zamora and a non-congressman, a certain “Luis Abalos,” receiving PDAF of P20 million. Included in the report supposedly for 2007 to 2009 was former Sen. Juan Flavier who ceased being a member of the Senate on 2001. Tan also admitted that the report covered only 58 percent of the total PDAF releases in the years covered, and upon closer examination mostly involved the PDAF of the five senators with Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile’s PDAF even exceeding his P600 million allocation for the three years covered. Tan said that the CoA relied on the Department of Budget and Management on the data it releases on the PDAF. As everybody knows, the Budget Secretary is Butch Abad which is a key official of Noynoy’s Liberal Party (LP). Bersana added the absence of any notice of disallowance is a congenital flaw in the special report, given that the Constitution vests exclusively in the CoA the power to disallow expenses; and the courts have traditionally, as jurisprudence shows, respected CoA on this and upheld such disallowances by CoA. The CoA report is being revealed to be what it truly is, an LP hack job.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 07:19:58 +0000
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