Public accountability

Unless Jocelyn Bolante and his former boss at the agriculture department, Cito Lorenzo, return to Manila, we won’t know for sure how high up responsibility goes in the disbursement of fertilizer funds during the campaign period last year.

Even without Bolante and Lorenzo, however, something useful can still come out of the ongoing focus on the fertilizer and farm input funds.

The furor should increase public awareness of the way lawmakers handle taxpayers’ money, and encourage the judicious disbursement of public funds.

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The P2.8-billion fertilizer fund that Bolante allegedly released to pro-administration lawmakers and local government officials during the campaign period last year was on top of the regular congressional pork barrel allocated in the annual national budget.

The congressional pork is one of the biggest perks of being a lawmaker in this country. It can win votes and buy friendships. It can guarantee a lawmaker’s re-election, or elevation to bigger roles on the national stage.

Used wisely, the pork barrel can be a boon to marginalized or underprivileged sectors and groups whose concerns do not attract publicity.

With the pork barrel equitably allocated, the system also prevents a district that picked the loser in a presidential election from being completely neglected by a vindictive administration.

Used unwisely — which surely happens often, considering the quality of many of our lawmakers — the congressional pork ends up chiefly serving the personal interests of senators and congressmen.

Roads and bridges are built in sparsely populated communities, for example, to serve real estate projects of a lawmaker’s spouse or family.

At worst, the system is used so lawmakers can receive fat commissions from crony contractors, a number of whom don’t even meet qualifications set by the public works department or other implementing agencies.

Those contractors are responsible for substandard roads that disintegrate in the first downpour and must be repaved over and over. They are responsible for construction projects that dam up natural drainage systems, which leads to flooding.

Under this system, overpricing is a given, with a lawmaker’s kickback factored into the final price.

With over 250 congressmen and senators having a direct say in the selection of projects for immediate implementation and even in the selection of contractors, long-term planning and a coordinated approach to development become difficult. What we have is a patchwork of projects that are meant simply to win brownie points for a legislator within a three-year term, and never mind if after that the projects fall apart.

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Defenders of the system point out, not without basis, that with so much corruption in executive agencies notably the Department of Public Works and Highways, it is prudent to give lawmakers a say in the identification of projects for funding and implementation.

At the height of debates on whether the congressional pork should be scrapped, at least one cynical senator pointed out that it was merely an argument over which thief should handle the loot.

No matter who takes charge, however, the system of transparency and accountability must be strengthened.

Surely Congress has rules along this line, but they are probably followed as faithfully as candidates follow rules on election spending and disclosure of campaign contributions.

At the end of each fiscal year lawmakers must submit a full, detailed accounting of the way they allocated their pork barrel. The reports must be opened not just to government auditors but also to the public, the way statements of assets and liabilities are presented every year for public scrutiny (and comic relief, in the case of lawmakers who hire topnotch accountants to hide questionable assets).

Government auditors must check if the contractors picked by lawmakers are legit. There must be a system of checking on the status of projects financed through pork barrel allocations.

Auditors must also check if non-government organizations and other groups that are beneficiaries of the pork barrel are legitimate. Government auditors have reportedly discovered that some of the fertilizer and farm input funds were allocated by lawmakers to shell NGOs and foundations. I’m pretty sure that this practice is not rare among lawmakers. COA auditors have said the fertilizer fund mess is just the tip of the iceberg.

Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Party-list representatives suspected of funneling funds to communist rebels and fronts or using their pork barrel to finance anti-government rallies should welcome any public scrutiny, if they really have nothing to hide, just as all other lawmakers should welcome any effort to promote transparency and accountability in all three branches of government.

Now congressmen who are under fire for alleged misuse of fertilizer funds want a similar scrutiny of senators’ pork barrel. By all means let’s do that. Anyone given responsibility over public funds must be ready to make a full public accounting of the way those funds are used.

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Senators are currently busy trying to compel the executive branch to make a full accounting of the disbursement of the fertilizer fund.

At week’s end it was learned from the Commission on Audit (COA) that P544 million recovered from the Marcoses was diverted to the fertilizer fund. The Department of Agrarian Reform has insisted that there is nothing wrong with this, and that the transfer of the funds to the Department of Agriculture was authorized through a resolution passed by the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council.

I don’t know if this is legal when the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law stipulates that all ill-gotten wealth recovered from the Marcoses and their cronies must go to agrarian reform. That provision in the law must be amended if part of the recovered Marcos wealth will be used to compensate victims of human rights abuses during the Marcos regime.

The good news here is that the COA is on its toes in this fertilizer fund mess. There are COA representatives in every government agency, and if they did a better, more thorough job, there would be much less corruption in the bureaucracy.

The best news is if the fund scandal leads to sweeping reforms, especially in the way executive and legislative officials handle public money.