Clark airport firm denies fund misuse

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines — The Clark International Airport Corp. (CIAC) has denied that it misused government funds in its grants to informal settlers.

Tagging a report as “done without research work,” the CIAC explained that the Commission on Audit (COA) issued “an unmodified opinion” – a valued auditing phrase – pertaining to the issue on granting financial assistance to informal settlers and other financial transactions of the CIAC in 2018.

“This means the COA accepted the CIAC’s justification and actions taken to address all audit observation memoranda,” it said.

The COA has not demanded nor sought further explanation on the CIAC’s previous granting of financial assistance to informal settlers. The COA maintained that CIAC’s actions on informal settlers were lawfully done, according to the latter.

The CIAC admitted, though, that COA indeed raised questions, but only before the submission of CIAC’s reply to COA dated May 8, 2019 justifying the payment of financial assistance along with the Agency Action Plan and Status of Implementation (AAPSI) submitted last July 31, 2019.

The compensation issues involving informal settlers were already addressed in the AAPSI submitted to COA in response to the latter’s audit observations. The AAPSI is a strictly required document in government auditing procedures – it is a summary and update of the agency’s actions on all audit observations.

The CIAC offered the Annual Audit Report CY 2018 of COA that could be easily accessed through the audit body's website.

The CIAC further explained that in 2009, it formulated a policy to clear informal settlers within Industrial Estate 5 that was guided by the valuation on financial assistance, patterned after an appraisal formula used by the Bases Conversion Development Authority-Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway (BCDA-SCTEX).  

Its version of the formula, it said, was a computation on the value of trees, crops and structure plus P50,000 for each bona fide claimant.

“This explains why the amount of financial assistance varies among recipients,” it said.