HOW dare you, Secretary Duque!
How dare you complain about the Commission on Audit’s (COA’s) factual report on the mishandling of funds in your department!
How dare you play victim when at this very moment, Filipinos continue to die from Covid-19, stuck in tricycles, unable to get a bed in any hospital, with vaccines continuing to be sparse or delayed.
How dare you go all emo in front of lawmakers, when thousands of grossly underpaid nurses and other health-care workers still have yet to receive the benefits due them, despite the 12-16 hours shifts they have had to pull to tend to the sick and dying among Covid patients.
As a long-time government official, this is not the first time around the block, so to speak, for Health Secretary Francisco Duque III in terms of the COA audit reports. He was PhilHealth president from 2001 to 2005, Health Secretary in 2005-2009, chair of the Civil Service Commission from 2010 to 2015, GSIS president in 2017, before returning to the again head Department of Health (DOH). All of these government agencies have been audited by the COA.
And this is not the first time either for the DOH to receive an “adverse opinion” from the COA, which is an auditing term that means the agency “misrepresented, misstated, and did not accurately reflect its financial performance and health” (Investopedia).
In 2019, the COA also gave the DOH an adverse opinion, citing misstatements in its reported assets, liabilities and net assets/equity, including an unrecorded value of land of some P16.42 billion by the San Lazaro Hospital. Among the COA’s key findings: the DOH only disbursed some 65 percent of its obligated funds “mainly due to partial implementations/realizations of 10 DOH major programs with 11.84 percent to 86.93 percent disbursement rates, showing the inability to optimize the utilization of its authorized appropriations” for that year.
The COA also found P2.2 billion in “expired or overstocked/slow moving or nearly expired” drugs and medicines, as well as medical and dental supplies. Similar disbursement issues and problems with expired medications were also observed in previous years’ audits of the DOH, all of which may be found on the COA’s web site.
In every annual audit report, the COA issued recommendation upon recommendation on how the DOH should improve the management of its finances, how to collect liquidation reports, and how to properly enter financial transactions in their books, in keeping with accepted global accounting standards.
And for the apparent lapses in the use of funds last year, Duque and other DOH officials cannot pin the blame on Covid-19 difficulties and the inability to gather the proper documents as proof of their financial transactions.
Most government agencies were subjected to similar Covid challenges to their operations, and yet not all of them received adverse opinions in their audit reports. In fact, quite a few of them even received an unqualified opinion, the highest audit rating an agency can garner stating the accuracy of its financial statements.
So it is extremely worrisome that government officials like Duque cry rape over the COA’s audit report when, in fact, the DOH was given a lengthy period of time to defend their financial statements. It should also be noted that the COA never said in its audit report that anyone in the DOH stole the questioned P67.3-billion in pandemic funds.
Also, it doesn’t give us taxpayers any measure of comfort to hear the highest leader of the land castigating the COA for basically doing its job. After all, to be able to claim that one is running an honest government, officials and the agencies they head have to be transparent in all transactions.
The COA is an independent government body which derives its powers from the Philippine Constitution. It evaluates how an agency uses its funds commensurate to the purpose and function of its existence. And as such, the COA’s primary purpose is to safeguard public funds, taxpayers’ money so to speak, from being misspent or inappropriately used.
Despite Duque’s grief and President Duterte’s frustration, it’s a welcome relief to hear COA chairman Michael Aguinaldo say his agency will continue to “fulfill its constitutional mandate.” As it should be. COA isn’t the enemy here. Neither is it the media, which merely reports on the published audit reports. It is the DOH’s responsibility to ensure it spends its budget wisely, giving the largest benefits to the most people, and ensure documents will cover all financial transactions in the fulfillment of its job. Just like any government agency.
Audits are nothing new. It is part of regular government operations. Duque should stop the screeching and just do his job more efficiently. Then maybe we’ll all sleep better at night.
Image courtesy of Scott Graham on Unsplash