Designed for discretion

Typhoon Nona battered Bicol and parts of the Visayas yesterday and brought heavy rains and flooding in Metro Manila.

The typhoon should again raise questions on how disaster funds, including donations from multilateral institutions and foreign governments are spent.

After Super Typhoon Yolanda struck, many foreign donors, surely familiar with the ways of the Philippine government, coursed their contributions through non-government organizations or United Nations agencies involved in public health, women and children’s welfare, economic development and poverty alleviation. The UN agencies and NGOs picked the aid recipients. Some donors even set up their own field hospitals with air-conditioned tents.

Others, however, gave donations in cash and kind to the Philippine government. Since then there has been an exchange of accusations and denials about alleged fund misuse and failure to use hundreds of millions in aid.

At the heart of this failure is the weakness of the monitoring system. I’ve asked some foreign donors, who are known for their strict monitoring rules in dispensing aid, how they keep track of fund utilization by our government.

The short answer is they can’t. And neither can the government. Seriously.

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One of them said former senator Panfilo Lacson got it right: much of the annual national budget is a pork barrel of sorts because the system is designed to make it impossible to accurately track fund utilization and the progress of projects.

Lacson would know; he accepted the job of rehabilitation czar after daang sarado received flak for bungling the initial response to Yolanda.

For a while there was speculation that Lacson was being eyed as President Aquino’s anointed for 2016, with the rehabilitation post supposed to make the former national police chief shine. But there were power blocs around P-Noy with different ideas.

Lacson quickly found himself an emasculated czar, with no control over funding and many other aspects of the rehabilitation effort. It didn’t take long before he began openly grousing that funds weren’t being released and he couldn’t get things moving.

If it’s any consolation to him, several financial and development aid experts told me that the problems he raised weren’t unique to the post-Yolanda effort.

“Government cannot track the budget,” one expert said. “People don’t talk to each other.”

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Codes are assigned to each project but the codes are changed down the line at whim by different agencies, the dismayed expert said. There is no “unique ID” for accurate tracking of projects being implemented and for proper auditing by the Commission on Audit.

Even if agencies are required to upload their budgets and expenditures on their websites for public scrutiny, anyone who bothers to look at the detailed reports cannot know for sure if agencies are referring to the same projects and programs, or whether a particular project is the same one that received specific funding under the annual General Appropriations Act (GAA).

It can drive development agencies and the donor community nuts trying to trace actual utilization of their aid as well as the amounts appropriated annually to government offices, the experts said.

They stressed that in the absence of unique IDs for project monitoring, politicians who have a say in fund utilization, including lawmakers and local government executives, can in fact do as they please with public funds.

This in essence amounts to a pork barrel, as Lacson earlier lamented, the experts pointed out.

They hailed the Supreme Court ruling that struck down the congressional pork barrel or Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), but in fact the system is still designed to give politicians and other government officials wide discretion in the utilization of public money.

This goes against the Supreme Court ruling on the PDAF and DAP, which banned officials’ exercise of discretion in the utilization of public funds after the annual GAA has been enacted.

Some quarters in the donor community have called the attention of daang sarado to this setup that is prone to corruption, but so far there has been no action.

“Yolanda brought this out because there was a need to track projects,” one official said, adding that under the setup, politicians “can do anything” with the projects.

So daang sarado is showing that a government can claim transparency, and still confound anyone who tries to monitor the judicious use of people’s money.

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SLAP ELECTION: Instead of slugging it out or shooting or slapping each other, these two presidential aspirants will probably end up shaking hands and patting each other on the back (while feeling for the best spot to plunge the knife) for public consumption.

The word war between 2016 aspirants Mar Roxas and Rodrigo Duterte has been dismissed by their rival, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, as nothing but the usual political silliness leading up to elections.

Despite the latest dare from Dirty Rody, no one is going to kill each other in a duel. Unlike in local races, candidates for national positions don’t eliminate rivals through actual assassinations; character assassination combined with legal persecution can be lethal enough.

Some observers, however, believe that beyond the amusement factor, a lot of bad blood is truly being generated, and this could still turn out to be a case of protracted ubusan ng lahi, mutual clan annihilation.

But for now, the word war is mainly spawning a host of jokes, with one of our editors dubbing the infantile exchange as the “slap election.”