The Commission on Audit or CoA could have done its best instead of having done its worst.
The publication of the annual audit reports of CoA on the accounts and financial operations of the Supreme Court and the Commission on Appointments for calendar year 2012, in violation of CoA Resolution 97-006 dated 28 January 1997, validates and raises the urgency of the implementation of the recommendation of Ombudsman Samuel Martires for the non-publication of the annual audit reports on government agencies.
The resolution provides that no CoA audit report of whatever nature shall be released until a copy of the audit report has been officially transmitted to and received by the head of the government agency being audited.
The purpose is to give the officials adversely affected by the report sufficient opportunity to explain their side and to include in the final annual audit report their explanations.
Obviously, without first discussing its adverse findings with the head of the Supreme Court or his duly appointed representative, CoA included these findings in its annual audit report for calendar year 2012.
These findings were published by mainstream media on 15 July 2014 that said “that Supreme Court magistrates appropriated P3.2 billion in ‘savings,’ or one-fifth of the high tribunal’s annual allocation for 2012, even though it still had some obligations to settle during the period.”
“Our audit revealed that in 2012, the Supreme Court declared as savings the total amount of P3.19 billion, or 22 percent of the total Notices of Cash Allocations, or NCAs, of P14.72 billion from the Department of Budget and Management,” CoA said.
Keen political observers and learned men and women of the academe opined that the CoA move was an underhanded retaliatory action against the Supreme Court for declaring the Priority Development Assistance Fund, or PDAF, unconstitutional on 19 November 2013; and the Disbursement Acceleration Program or DAP as invalid on 1 July 2014, as modified on 3 February 2015 with finality; and for taking to task CoA chairperson Grace Pulido-Tan on 8 October 2013, where she appeared as a “Friend of the Court” during the oral arguments on the PDAF.
The Supreme Court had observed that the alleged misuse of the Congressional Development Assistance Fund had been going on for a long time, and that CoA had failed to investigate this matter.
Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Teresita de Castro then asked the CoA chief: “Where was CoA all along?”
Pulido-Tan took the easy way out and laid the blame on her predecessors, saying that she couldn’t answer the question posed to her by the justice, claiming she was not with CoA then.
The answer failed to sit well with Justice De Castro as she pointed out that the CoA is not bound by the regulations of the budget and management, stressing that the CoA is bound by its constitutional mandate to do its job.
“You cannot just blame past CoA officials. There should be institutional continuity in the agency,” De Castro said.
The Commission on Audit noted that the Supreme Court had declared the savings even though it still had unpaid obligations during the year, such as P114.42 million in transactions made from May to December 2012 that were paid only in 2013 using that year’s allocation.
The existence of expenses already incurred but not yet paid in different courts as of the end of the year showed that the MCP (monthly cash program) prepared by management was not realistic or attuned to timelines outlined in the implementation of the agency’s programs and projects.
The CoA said the procedure currently being observed by the Supreme Court ran counter to Presidential Decree No. 1449 which created the JDF.
(To be continued)