The Commission on Audit (COA) had already identified questionable flood control projects as early as 2016, yet many of its findings were left unaddressed, allowing irregularities to persist until they exploded into the multibillion-peso scandal now under investigation by several government bodies.
House Deputy Majority Leader and Manila Rep. Ernesto Dionisio, Jr. led the exchange with COA Auditor Tracy Ann Sunico in a recent public hearing, pointing out that if ghost projects exist today, they may have been rooted in irregularities long ignored from previous years.
Sunico confirmed that COA had long observed red flags in flood control projects, consolidating the findings across the country.
“We have many observations. I can’t break them down one-by-one when it comes to flood control (projects), sir, because they have been consolidated. But these were flagged as early as 2015-16,” the state auditor explained.
She pointed to 2016 as the earliest year she had personally reviewed the documents. One irregularity she cited was “the fact that there were many bidders who did not declare all of their lists of ongoing projects in their financial and technical documents.”
“There was also an observation that… the same key personnel were assigned to the contractors’ simultaneous projects, and their equipment were the same,” Sunico noted.
The COA auditor detailed how discrepancies between official reports and on-the-ground inspections were common.
For Dionisio, these revelations underscored how longstanding the problems were.
Sunico responded that the amounts involved were massive and documented. She also mentioned that since 2016, they have released lists of notices of charges, suspensions and disallowances of state-funded projects amounting to P120-billion.
Dionisio then asked COA to turn over the complete set of findings to aid the committee’s ongoing investigation. Sunico agreed to provide the documents.
