By el Amigo
MANILA, Philippines — A former Commission on Audit (COA) auditor testified before the Senate impeachment court on Wednesday that he had never before encountered government confidential funds being used to provide medicines as rewards for intelligence information, describing the arrangement as unprecedented in his auditing career.
Appearing as a prosecution witness in the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, former COA Intelligence and Confidential Funds Audit Office (ICFAO) auditor Roderick Wamil responded to questions from Senator-Judge Risa Hontiveros regarding transactions involving medicines allegedly distributed to informants.
Asked whether such a practice was common in government audits, Wamil answered that it was not, adding that it was the first instance he had seen while examining confidential fund transactions.
He explained that auditors relied on the descriptions contained in the submitted liquidation documents, which allowed the transactions to be interpreted either as intelligence rewards or as the provision of medicines.
Wamil also testified that COA did not determine the medical conditions of the recipients or the reasons they allegedly received medicines in exchange for intelligence information, noting that those details were absent from the documents submitted for audit.
During the hearing, Hontiveros cited an acknowledgment receipt indicating that “Mary Grace Piattos” supposedly received medicines worth PHP70,000 as a reward. Wamil said the audit records did not explain what illness the recipient had or why the medicines were issued.
He further testified that the Office of the Vice President (OVP) failed to present proof that intelligence operations connected to the reward payments had produced any results, making it impossible for COA to verify whether the confidential fund disbursements complied with Joint Circular No. 2015-01 governing confidential and intelligence funds.
Wamil also described another unusual incident during the audit, saying the OVP was the only government office he had encountered that initially declined to receive an Audit Observation Memorandum (AOM).
According to the witness, agencies he previously audited routinely accepted and responded to AOMs, but no authorized official at the OVP initially received the document, making the situation highly unusual.
The former auditor likewise reaffirmed that OVP Chief of Staff Zuleika Lopez and then-Department of Education chief of staff and spokesperson Michael Poa met with ICFAO officials in September 2023 to request that auditors issue an audit query instead of an AOM.
However, Wamil said the request was denied because the governing joint circular does not recognize an audit query as an authorized audit action. He agreed with Senator-Judge Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan that granting the request would have violated existing audit rules.
Wamil also raised concerns over the reported disbursement of approximately PHP17 million in confidential funds through 111 transactions recorded on Dec. 23, 2022.
While he noted that the joint circular does not prescribe a limit on the number of confidential fund disbursements that may be made in a single day, he acknowledged that such a volume of transactions was unusual, although he stopped short of describing it as irregular.
The witness is testifying on Article I of the impeachment complaint, which accuses Duterte of allegedly misusing PHP612.5 million in confidential funds released to the OVP and the Department of Education during her tenure.
elamigo/xf
