Ombudsman to use texting vs graft

The Office of the Ombudsman will soon launch a text message reporting system, which will give ordinary Filipinos a more active role in the fight against corruption.

Tony Kwok, consultant to the Ombudsman and former chief of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, said it would be best to utilize the country’s most popular means of communication to find out which government officials are involved in corruption.

"That is a way the public can report corruption, cases of lifestyle checks," Kwok said during the 17th founding anniversary celebration of the Office of the Ombudsman last May 12.

He said the Ombudsman would have to look for free resources and services of volunteers, like accountants and civil society organizations, to help implement lifestyle checks on civil servants.

Kwok said civilian groups could also monitor the progress of corruption cases filed by the government against its officials and employees.

He added that the government’s anti-corruption drive would be anchored on a four-pronged strategy — prevention, education, change of culture and partnership.

Kwok said as part of this strategy, there may be a "tri-party code of conduct" among government officials, contractors and suppliers to ensure a graft-free procurement process within the government’s various departments and agencies.

He said the government should focus on procurement, public works and revenue collection to save money since it is difficult to prevent corruption on all fronts at the same time.

For his part, Ombudsman Simeon Marcelo said the monitoring of government procurements would have to go all the way to the barangay level if the government wants to instill in all Filipinos the drive to fight corruption.

He said his office is recruiting volunteers such as the Coalition Against Corruption to monitor the procurement process in various government agencies and departments.

Marcelo said retired or current private sector executives with time on their hands and no conflict of interest would also be tapped to become observers in the procurement of big-ticket items.

Kwok and Marcelo said these anti-corruption projects are being launched at the right time because the Office of the Ombudsman has been successful in its investigation and prosecution of erring government officials and employees.

Marcelo said they would want to make use of the additional resources allocated by the national government in the 2005 budget to hire more prosecutors, field investigators and staff to speed up the resolution of cases.

Though the ratio of prosecutors to government employees is one to 17,000, Marcelo said his office will make do and simply implement the anti-corruption drive step by step. Hong Kong, on the other hand, has one prosecutor for every 208 government employees.

He said the first three agencies to be cleansed of corruption are

the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Bureau of Customs and the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

Citing President Arroyo’s promise to provide more funds to the anti-corruption drive, Marcelo said he hopes to hire at least 2,000 prosecutors and thousands of investigators and support staff as well.

"Right now we can say there’s a lot of success already," he said.