The guardrails did not do their job. They didn’t function as they should have. And so all the bad things happened.
When disasters or scandals happen, one of the first words that come to a person’s mind is the word ‘guardrails’. The current flood-control projects scandal is no exception: guardrails were once of the first words that come to my mind.
Guardrails are man-made mechanisms that are put in place to prevent the occurrence, or at the very least mitigate the impact, of disasters. Scandals or other adverse happenings. The essence of guardrails is prevention; when they fail to perform their prevention function, whether through intentional criminal action or through criminal negligence, bad things happen.
In the current flood-control projects scandal the guardrails were expected to protect the nation from the depredations of a humungous combination of malign institutions consisting of Congress, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and the group of contractors found by the investigators to have violated the terms of DPWH contracts worth billions of pesos.
The guardrails did not do their job. They didn’t function as they should have. And so all the bad things happened.
The most important of the non-functioning guardrails was the Budget department headed by Secretary Amenah Pangandaman. The facts suggest that where the DPWH has been concerned the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has shown little interest in evaluation and review. If it were possible to charge the DBM in the present scandal, the charges would include (1) culpable failure to ascertain why so many flood control projects were being awarded to companies with more or less the same ownership, and (2) culpable failure to determine the contractors’ financial capability to undertake all the projects covered by their DPWH contracts.
Indeed, with the seemingly free flow of flood control funds from DBM to DPWH, it is tempting to propose the merger of the two departments into the Department of Budget, Management, Public Works and Highways.
Another major non-functioning guardrail was the Commission on Audit (COA). Truth to tell, COA, a Constitutional body, has taken a big hit in the flood control scandal – a hit which it may take a long time to recover from. The government audit institution clearly has a problem when COA auditors in the field can no longer be relied upon to render truthful reports on infrastructure projects.
Another non-functioning guardrail was the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC). It took the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) a long time to take the Philippines off its grey list of suspected money-laundering countries because the Philippine government was slow to act on FATF’s warning that the casinos were being used as money-laundering conduits. The Filipino people are wondering why AMLC was not able to learn that DPWH personnel were regular casino patrons who daily lost millions of the Filipino people’s money at the gaming tables of the leading Metro Manila casinos. There are indications that the casinos were used as money-laundering conduits by the DPWH’s gambling addicts. Good AMLC intelligence should have sought to examine those indications. Unfortunately, good AMLC intelligence work was missing.
The final item in this list of guardrails that failed to prevent the worst fiscal scandal in Philippine government’s history is the Presidential Management Staff (PMS) of the Office of the President of the Philippines (OP).
As its name indicates, the function of PMS is management. It is the most important management staff in this country because it manages the office of the nation’s most powerful chief executives – the President of the Philippines. The PMS is the last stop on an official document’s journey to the signature of the President of the Philippines; the presumption is that every document that His Excellency signs has undergone scrutiny by the PMS.
Where the proposed General Appropriations Acts (GAAs) of recent years are concerned, it is clear that PMS failed the President – and the nation. It failed to tell the President about the insertions of unprogrammed flood control projects into those documents.
The guardrails against corruption in the government’s spending on infrastructure – must be made to perform their function hereafter. A repetition of the present scandal is unthinkable.
(llagasjessa@yahoo.com)
