Ombudsman Samuel Martires has asked the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations (COA) to remove confidential funds from the proposed P5.824 billion budget of the Office of the Ombudsman (OMB) for 2025.
“I will appreciate really if Congress will remove the confidential fund from our budget,” Martires said during the OMB’s budget briefing.
Martires made the statement in response ACT Teachers Party-list Rep.France Castro, who asked for an update on the OMB’s P31 million and P51 million confidential fund allocations for Fiscal Years 2023 and 2024.
“I’d rather not have a confidential fund until the end of my term of office than to have a confidential fund where people will be raising their eyebrows. I eat at a restaurant, (then) people say that your water … that I drink comes from the confidential fund,” Martires said.
The Ombudsman nonetheless asked the committee to consider providing additional funding to put up more OMB satellite offices, hire more lawyers, and support its digitalization program, which the panel approved.
“There is a need to hire 60 more lawyers from the present lawyers the OMB have,” Martires said, citing that there are more non-lawyers than lawyers in OMB units involved in investigation.
Castro took note that the OMB’s 1,300 cases for fact-finding in the first six months of 2024 is lower by 32 percent to the 2,038 for the same period last year. Out of the total, the OMB completed the investigation of 389 complaints for the first semester, which is 21% higher than the target at the start of the year.
“To speed up the investigation of complaints, we are trying to merge now the fact-finding office and the preliminary investigation office. So when the complaint is filed, it will be immediately assigned to a lawyer who will conduct a case evaluation, and the lawyer will determine whether to proceed with the preliminary investigation or to recommend for the dismissal of the case or to recommend for a case build-up,” Martires said.
He also volunteered for courts to dismiss many criminal cases on the ground of inordinate delay.
