The flood control scam now hogging the public limelight did not appear out of thin air, but can be traced back to questionable budget insertions made during the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte.
House Committee on Good Government chairman and Manila Rep. Joel Chua warned in a public hearing on Tuesday that years of unchecked practices had allowed ghost and substandard projects to proliferate nationwide.
“The names of contractors who were repeatedly awarded flood control projects came out—projects that later proved to be ghost projects or had low quality construction, or contractors who were undercapitalized but were awarded large projects,” Chua said in Filipino.
The House of Representatives opened its own probe on the controversial flood control projects under the ‘Infra Comm’ composed of the Committees on Public Accounts, Good Government and Public Accountability, and Public Works and Highways.
Chua said the controversy was not born overnight but could be traced to long-standing practices of budget insertions that proliferated during the Duterte presidency, creating an environment where unchecked anomalies thrived.
He reminded colleagues that the Commission on Audit (CoA) had issued reports from 2017 to 2020 revealing thousands of projects that were either delayed, defective or never implemented at all, costing the public hundreds of billions.
“In 2018, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) reported the involvement of several large contractors in flood control projects that were either delayed or not completed,” Chua noted.
He said the flood control scam is not new, adding that even the House Committee on Appropriations confirmed the pattern in 2019. “Many flood control projects are prone to what is known as budget insertion – projects that are inserted into the fund without clear consultation or basis,” he said.
“According to their report, the value of the projects being inserted reached billions of pesos, which opened a wide space for corruption and misappropriation of the public treasury,” Chua emphasized.
According to Chua, the flood control scam was further validated by no less than Duterte himself.
An ABS-CBN News report in 2019 quoted then presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo, speaking in defense of then Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno, who had a tiff with then House Majority Leader Rolando Andaya Jr. when the latter questioned budget insertions in the 2019 national budget.
Andaya—who died in 2022—accused Diokno of arbitrarily “inserting” P75-billion worth of funds in the proposed budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), which was then led by now Senator Mark Villar. Diokno denied Andaya’s allegation and said it was requested by DPWH.
The Manila lawmaker reminded that part of the mess was misfeasance in project execution.
For Chua, the task of the Infra-Comm is to identify exactly where these loopholes allowed anomalies to enter the system.
The legislator assured that the proceedings were not meant to pit one agency against another but to find where corruption slipped through.
