House to flush out 'ghosts' in AFP, PNP

MANILA, Philippines - The House of Representatives will try to flush out “ghost” soldiers through special provisions in the proposed P1.8-trillion 2012 national budget.

Cebu City Rep. Tomas Osmeña, who heads an appropriations subcommittee, said he would recommend certain safeguards in the budget to make sure that billions in funds for salaries are received only by “warm bodies” in the military and are not pocketed by corrupt officers and civilian personnel.

Osmeña’s subcommittee is in charge of the combined budget of the Department of National Defense, the general headquarters of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and its three major commands.

Osmeña said one special provision he intends to recommend would require all soldiers to register themselves as voters through the biometrics system of the Commission on Elections.

He said a voter’s ID would be one of the documents a soldier would need before he can claim his salary.

As a complementary measure, he said he would suggest that all military payrolls be handled by the Land Bank of the Philippines, which would be required to ensure that all salary claimants are legitimate soldiers.

“With these safeguards, the military would have to convert those ghost soldiers into flesh and blood,” he said.

Some appropriations committee members suggested that the planned safeguards should also be put in place in the Philippine National Police (PNP), where there are also “ghost” policemen and other personnel, and whose staffing size is almost the same as the AFP.

The two internal and external security agencies are believed to have combined personnel of between 240,000 and 260,000.

According to former AFP budget officer George Rabusa, at least 20 percent of the personnel staffing of the military is not filled with warm bodies.

He alleged that the funds for these unfilled positions are “converted” into cash and shared by high-ranking AFP officers and used as “pabaon (sendoff gift)” and “pasalubong (welcome gift)” for outgoing and incoming chiefs of staff.

Rabusa has accused former chiefs of staff of receiving millions of pesos in send-off money. He has filed plunder charges against them.

Osmeña revealed his plans to plug loopholes in the use of AFP funds in the course of a House budget hearing on the proposed 2012 budget of the Commission on Audit (COA).

Rep. Neri Colmenares of the party-list group Bayan Muna asked COA officials if they are auditing the staffing pattern of the AFP down to the last foot soldier, and if they have an actual count of military personnel.

COA officials informed him that every time they seek a listing of soldiers from the AFP, they are told that the document is “classified and secret.”

They added that they don’t know whether the billions in funds for soldiers’ salaries they allow in audit are actually paid to warm bodies.

COA officials also said though they have lifted the pre-audit of transactions in most government offices, they want the AFP and the PNP to keep the system.

“It is military and the PNP where we found internal controls to be weak,” COA Chairperson Grace Pulito Tan said.