Who really tarnished military, audit body?

The Commission on Audit twice was in the news Thursday, both to do with military comptroller Gen. Carlos Garcia’s plundering. At the Senate whistleblower Col. George Rabusa talked about COA auditors assigned to the Armed Forces GHQ in 2000-2002. Allegedly the resident auditors received from Garcia two percent of the loot stolen by thieving generals. Meanwhile, the COA head office assailed the very examiner, Heidi Mendoza, who had found the resident auditors’ work wanting. Supposedly she “put the agency in a bad light” in decrying COA officials’ faint support for her 2004-2006 review of Garcia’s shenanigans.

Mendoza, then also at the Senate awaiting her turn to testify, was deeply hurt by the broadside. She had spent 22 years of her life with the agency, helping raise its performance standards and output, only to be treated that way. In tears, she begged the senators to excuse her from further testifying, lest she antagonize more former coworkers by telling the truth.

The COA apparently disliked Mendoza’s disclosures last Tuesday at the House of Reps. For one, she said could trust only some of the nine auditors detailed to her 2004-2006 audit team. That was why the work took so long. Too, they had to rummage through the mishmash of papers in dozens of dusty crates at the hot GHQ warehouse. All that time, an official who oversaw military audits kept taunting her that she’d find no documents fraudulently signed by Garcia. Worst, the then-COA chief Guillermo Carague was unhelpful. Mendoza already was under pressure by superiors’ murmurs about Malacañang calls to go slow on her audit. Still Carague belittled her persistence. This, although she had unearthed Garcia’s P200-million malversation of United Nations reimbursements. Carague disallowed Mendoza from pursuing the examination in the UN headquarters in New York. This was despite the strong recommendation of the US embassy’s legal attaché, and the Philippines being head then of the UN audit body. Instead, Carague advised Mendoza to drop the audit and just name the position to which she wished promotion. She resigned in disgust. Mendoza recounted all this in relation to her appearance at the Sandiganbayan in 2007-2008 as star witness.

Mendoza’s travails were material to Congress’ probes of Garcia’s questioned plea bargain and bail by the Ombudsman. This is because the Ombudsman itself oddly had strived to debunk her testimony via five witnesses who used to work for Garcia. Also, because Carague disowned Mendoza’s audit report before the Sandigan. Instead of taking criticism as part of self-improvement, the COA chose to attack the critic. The office implied that Mendoza tainted it with her doubts about coworkers’ honesty and superiors’ credibility. The message is for critics to shut up.

But is it really Mendoza who’s giving the COA bad name? Or is it even Rabusa, and corroborator Col. Antonio Ramon Lim? Auditors have been linked to fund scams in various government agencies. In the AFP one auditor has avoided rotation for 14 long years, allegedly on the say-so of five superiors. Are they not the ones staining the COA’s image? How come the agency has said nothing about such irregularity? Is it because the beneficiaries of sleaze lead it?

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In the military, meanwhile, anonymous texts and e-mails have been circulating ever since Garcia’s plea deal and bail hit the headlines. Supposedly the exposés of corruption in the military are tarnishing the images of the AFP and the Philippine Military Academy. Invariably the messages end with vague warnings of demoralization and destabilization.

Now how can exposés of fraud in 1999-2003 stain the military/s image today? Mendoza carefully has pointed out that what she testified to in 2007-2008 were her audit findings in 2004-2006 about AFP dealings in 2001-2003. That was the time Garcia was comptroller. Rabusa, backed by Lim, stressed in testimonies that he can be certain only about events during his term as AFP budget officer, in 2000-2002. That period began with Gen. Jacinto Ligot as comptroller, followed by Garcia. Still the text and e-mail brigade presumes foot soldiers to be so stupid they don’t want to know who stole their budget for boots and ammo before. Obviously the message is confused because the sender only wants to cover up the exposés; he must be one of the plunderers.

The spokesman assures that the AFP reformed its finance handling and abolished Ligot and Garcia’s powerful office in 2005. That’s true. But doubts linger if the changes continued. To recall, the defense secretary and undersecretaries who had broken up the old AFP “comptrollership mafia” eventually resigned in disgust with their Commander-in-Chief. A strong suspicion is that the latter reinstituted patronage to buy the generals’ loyalty. But then, the present AFP chief, Gen. Ricardo David Jr. has laid down an open-books policy. Report what you know of past fund anomalies, even of present ones if any, and we will protect you, he asks the troops. That scares the plunderers into churning out those mindless texts and e-mails.

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