Just recently, President Duterte has said no to the shutting down of Philippine offshore gaming operators or POGOs, despite allegations of crimes linked to their operation, corruption, money laundering, bribery, sex trafficking, and kidnapping.
Presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo said there is no reason for a shutdown, this despite growing clamor from many sectors for the government to make a decisive action on POGOs. According to Panelo, the President has other sources of information to back up his decision on POGOs, adding that billions of revenues coming from offshore gambling hubs can be used to fund the government’s infrastructure program.
The Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), in a Senate hearing, said it flagged P14 billion in suspicious transactions within a two-year period in connection with POGO operations. Under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, a suspicious transaction includes those which are in any way related to an unlawful activity or offense under the Act which is about to be, is being or has been committed.
Sen. Franklin Drilon stressed that the social problems brought into the country by these POGOs are not worth the regulation fees that are earned while Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers has warned that it is likely that some of the Chinese workers in the country are not POGO workers but are spies.
According to one news report, the POGO industry employs more than 200,000 Chinese nationals, many of who do not have employment permits and tax identification numbers (TIN) from the Bureau of International Revenue. One report even said hundreds of POGO employees share the same TIN.
Meanwhile, of the more than 230 POGOs operating in the Philippines, only 60 are licensed to engage in online gaming. And of the 60, only 10 were paying taxes to the government, according to the BIR.
News reports also revealed that the BIR was expecting to collect as much as P50 billion from POGOs in 2019, but it was able to raise only P5 billion. This is on top of the fact that POGOs are not paying franchise taxes.
POGOs are clearly taking advantage of government’s refusal to deal with the problem. On the other hand, the same government has been going after big businesses and so-called oligarchs which have been legitimately operating and religiously paying their taxes.
Take the case of ABS-CBN Corp., whose legislative franchise to engage in broadcasting, has not been renewed by Congress. Instead, the National Telecommunications Commission will just issue a provisional authority to operate pending renewal of the franchise. According to sources, Congress will just let ABS-CBN operate on a mere PA until the end of President Duterte’s term to make sure that the network toes the line so to speak.
Unfortunately, one lawyer is asking the Supreme Court to prevent House Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano and NTC Commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba from extending ABS-CBN’s PA.
Then we have Solicitor General Jose Calida asking the High Court to strip ABS-CBN of its franchise due to alleged violations.
ABS-CBN is far from being perfect. In fact, no less that the company president Carlo Katigbak has publicly apologized to Duterte for the network’s failure to air the President’s political ads during the 2016 election and for airing a smear ad against him by opposition Senator Antonio Trillanes. While the President has accepted the apology, he also said that he will not meddle on the matter of the franchise renewal as well as the case filed by Calida.
Why does this government refuse to save a company that employs thousands of Filipinos while at the same supporting foreign gaming companies which have been wantonly been violating our laws?
Flawed study Why are academic journals important?
A publication by the Oxford University Press explained that journal articles are generally accorded greater prestige and merit within the scientific community compared to other forms of disseminating research findings such as books and presenting papers at professional conferences because published journal articles typically go through a rigorous screening process known as blind peer review. In this review, independent experts provide the author with critical commentary and suggestions to improve their final paper prior to publication.
If a published article, especially medical ones, turn out to be wrong in their findings or conclusion, the impact can be tremendous especially if we are talking about lives being at stake. So that in academic publishing, there is such a thing as retraction which is a statement in an academic journal stating that a peer-reviewed article previously published in the journal should be considered as invalid as a source of knowledge. If the retraction is due to an honest error, then the corrected paper can be republished. But if it is due to serious misconduct, then action must be taken by the employer against the erring author.
One recent case of retraction involves a study originally published in the June 2019 issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) entitled “Electronic Cigarette Use and Myocardial Infarction Among Adults in the US Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH).”
The study concluded that e-cigarette use is associated with increased risk of having had a myocardial infarction [heart attack]. It said that the effect of e-cigarette use is similar to conventional cigarette and that dual use of e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes is riskier than using either product alone.
The same study added that e-cigarettes should not be promoted or prescribed as a less risky alternative to combustible cigarettes and should not be recommended for smoking cessation among people with or at risk of myocardial infarction.
But several experts questioned the validity of the study. Researchers from the University of Louisville pointed out that the analysis done in the study included former smokers who had heart attacks before they started using e-cigarettes and that if those subjects were excluded, the association described by the study authors disappeared.
The said researchers asked JAHA editors to retract the article, saying that its main findings are false and invalid and that the analysis is an indefensible breach of any reasonable standard for research on association or causation.
Last January, 16 prominent tobacco researchers also wrote to the JAHA, saying the primary finding of the study is based on a critical error.
Then last Feb. 18, JAHA said it was retracting the publication of the study. It appears that the journal’s editors made a mistake. While they identified the important question of whether the [heart attacks] occurred before or after the respondents initiated e-cigarette use, and requested that the authors use additional data in the PATH codebook (age of first heart attack and age of first e-cigarettes use) to address this concern and that the authors did provide some additional analysis, the journal editors were not able to confirm that the authors had both understood and complied with the request prior to acceptance of the article for publication.
After the study’s publication, the editors requested the authors to conduct the analysis based on when specific respondents started using e-cigarettes, which required ongoing access to the restricted use dataset from the PATH Wave 1 survey. The deadline set by the editors for completion of the revised analysis was not met because the authors were unable to access the PATH database. Given these issues, the editors are concerned that the study conclusion is unreliable, JAHA said.
This is not the first time that an academic journal has done a retraction. But this latest case involving JAHA should serve as a reminder that journals are important not only to their readers in their community but also because many of these studies become basis for government regulations.
For comments, e-mail at mareyes@philstarmedia.com