The Congress pot calling the executive kettle black

Our legislators are properly incensed. Government is wasting too much public money. Phone phreaking alone cost taxpayers P2.5 billion last year, Rep. Baham Mitra fumes. Also since 2005 unliquidated cash advances have totaled P17.2 billion, Sen. Frank Drilon growls. All this, in the face of a P5.5-trillion national debt.

The two imply that the executive alone, unaided by the legislature and staff, racked up such appalling bills. Yet Congress is equally capable of squander. Senators tirelessly twit congressmen for frittering away P2.86 billion last year to enact 400 or so laws of mere local effect, say, changing the name of this street or that barangay. To which congressmen retort that senators, on a budget of P1.34 billion also last year, passed only four laws.

Mitra and Drilon draw their figures from the Commission on Audit. Congress is lucky there’s a COA from which to get ammo for glitzy attacks on the executive. Sadly taxpayers do not have similar access to COA files with which to appraise their legislators. The COA in fact hardly has any ledger at all of congressional spending.

It is an open secret in government. While COA is strict in scrutinizing executive agencies, it hardly reviews how Congress (mis)uses public funds. This is not to say the executive thus sticks to the straight and narrow path, but to stress that the road to Congress is paved with COA inattention. In the book, The Rulemakers, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism compiles several ways how legislators escape audit.

The book is aptly subtitled, How the Wealthy and Well-Born Dominate Congress. For, it points out details like this that only the political elite can pull off: "From the Eighth to the Tenth Congress, each lawmaker received a basic salary of P17,000 a month, or P204,000 a year. The basic pay has since been adjusted twice, to P26,000 a month in 1998 and P35,000 the following year. This is what the public generally knows about the salaries of senators and congressmen - and about the only thing ordinary citizens ever learn about their compensation... In the last quarter of every year, COA publishes an ‘itemized list of amounts paid to and expenses incurred for’ each senator and congressman in a leading daily. But the list is far from complete. The amounts from 1994 to 2002, for example, represent only 47 percent of the total budget of the House and 26 percent of the Senate’s. Where the rest of the budgets went is unclear, because COA provides no details."

The answer lies in separate House and Senate rules on cash handling. On top of monthly salaries, congressmen get allowances as House officers or committee chairmen, stipends from the Speaker, and cash advances and reimbursements for official activities. These expenses are nowhere in the COA list of expenses of the House. This is why a first-term congressman was surprised, as the book narrates, to receive P240,000 on his first day at work. The cash covered, among others, salaries for his staff and rent for a district office, but for which he need not produce signatures or receipts.

The book goes on: "Amounts received by senators for similar duties are indistinguishable from other expenses such as advertising." In breach of a constitutional requirement for transparency and integrity in public office, such expenses are just booked as "other MOE (maintenance and operating expenses." That is why in 2002 the senators’ expenses, including foreign travel, were on average 112 higher than what COA knew.

Drilon’s spending for 2002, as then-Senate President, was used as example. COA’s published list showed him to have spent P6 million in MOOE (maintenance, operating, and other expenses). But the Senate ledger showed him to have received P21 million. That’s 250 percent more, which COA never audited. The COA list also never mentioned the P1.3 million that Drilon spent for foreign travel.

Speaking of which, foreign travel seems to be the original sin in the creation of the Philippine legislature. In 1908, a year after the first election to the Philippine Assembly, his dominant Nacionalista Party mates allotted $17,000 to Manuel Quezon and two aides to attend a conference in Moscow. Yet they knew full well that he would not reach Russia in time for the event (due to the long trip), and the amount was excessive (adjusted for inflation, $17,000 in 1908 is worth $350,000, or P17.5 million, in 2006). Quezon instead enjoyed the booze and belles of Paris at early taxpayers’ expense. To shame the Assembly (Lower House), the American-appointed Commission (Upper House) allocated P4,000 ($2,000 in the exchange rate then) for two delegates to the International Tuberculosis Congress. The events are immortalized in the records of the "Philippine Independence Missions".

The records of author Bernardita Reyes Churchill detail other abuses. Footnote 45, p. 312, for instance, laments that the Missions "made a terrible impression ... by the way they allowed themselves extravagant travel expenses." Footnote 76, p. 315, lists the yearly travel bills of the Mission’s 28 members, with today’s values in parentheses: 1919, $239,000 ($2.8 million, P140 million); 1920, $124,000 ($1.3 million, P65 million); 1921, $195,000 ($2.2 million, P110 million); 1922, $366,000 ($4.4 million, P220 million).

Carlos Quirino’s bio of Sergio Osmeña confirms Churchill’s figures. Mission members drew travel per diems of $30 each, while chairmen got $100, equivalent today to $362 (P18,100) and $1,207 (P60,350), respectively. Quirino recounted that the entire Philippine Assembly declared itself to be part of the Independence Missions - and requested the same per diems. More scandalously, the bulk of the Assembly never left Manila, yet still collected the travel per diem.

Such waste went on under the post-War Congress. The Philippines Free Press in the ’60s exposed the multiple allowances of legislators. "Secret salaries" had risen from P3,000 in 1954 to P100,000 in 1962, then to P250,000 in 1965. "No solon on record has reported his congressional allowances in his income tax report," the Free Press charged. "To collect illegal allowances without paying taxes on them is to cheat the government twice."

And it goes on to this day. On top of the no-audit allowances is the similarly no-audit congressional pork. Sen. Ping Lacson reminds colleagues that the pork barrel is the primary source of corruption. As shown by Jocjoc Bolante’s P7.8-billion fertilizer dole in 2004 to legislators who pretend today never to have seen it, the yearly P200 million pork per senator and P70 million per congressman can buy anything, even political silence. Why, in the wake of devastating Typhoon Milenyo, the members of the Opposition are requesting Malacañang, in exchange for whatever, to release their pork slabs posthaste.

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