Commission on Audit says NSAs must liquidate advances

MANILA, Philippines - The Philippine Sports Commission will implement a new Commission on Audit ruling, requiring all NSAs (national sports associations) to secure a Securities and Exchange Commission Registration and liquidate past financial assistance first before it could draw funds from the sports agency.

Mario Lipana, the CoA’s auditor to the PSC, yesterday said he has already asked PSC chairman Harry Angping to inform all NSAs of the CoA circular 2007-001, which should help the government get rid of erring NSAs that continuously ignore calls to liquidate past cash advances.

“Now that it will be implemented on Aug. 1, we expect the PSC to initiate a meeting with all NSAs so that they would be informed of the new CoA ruling or what we call the re-imposition of pre-audit,” Lipana said.

According to Lipana, nearly P107 million remain unaccounted for from 52 of the total 57 regular and associate NSAs.

“We are starting from scratch so we have to write all these NSAs and ask and require them to submit SEC registration that happens to be one of our requirements before we extend financial assistance,” said Angping. “It’s a long and tedious process and we are ready to receive complaints from all the NSAs, I’m sure they’ll be raising a lot of hell.”

Swimming has unliquidated funds of P30.76 million, including a P29 million it directly drew from the Philippine Gaming Corporation.

“Out of the 57, almost all have existing un-liquidated financial assistance topped by the P30 million plus from swimming. They’ve asked for a 30-day grace period to complete their documents and they have until the end of the month to do it,” said Lipana.

“Actually, swimming is a special case because they got their financial assistance directly from Pagcor without the knowledge of the PSC, that’s about P29 million plus their outstanding balance of over P1 million, that’s about P30 million plus,” he added.

Others in the CoA list are volleyball, chess, football and cycling with un-liquidated funds of P6,215,757,80, P5,998, 710.38, P4,982,583.71 and P4,519,208.98, respectively.

Archery (P3,926,539.07), karatedo (P3,342,219.97), weightlifting (P3,229,156.95), little league baseball (P3,200,000) and wrestling (P3,184,380.80) round out the top 10 erring NSAs.

Bodybuilding, golf, handball, ice skating, soft tennis and softball, in contrast, have zero advances.

Interestingly, windsurfing has the lowest un-liquidated assistance of only P5,640.

“Hopefully, the NSAs should settle all their un-liquidated financial assistance to us and update their record to SEC otherwise they will not be receiving any assistance from government,” said Lipana.

He also advised NSAs to inform CoA if the assistance that was given to them was drawn by the previous administration.

“They should write a letter to us stating their predicament. If they could prove the money was spent by the previous administration then it will become a personal liability of that previous president and we will run after them and we will initiate criminal action against them if they still don’t liquidate,” said Lipana.