Escalation

In this last skirmish, China Coast Guard (CCG) vessels did not just hose down Philippine boats en route to delivering supplies to the Philippine Marines outpost aboard the BRP Sierra Madre. The Chinese ships rammed one vessel, confiscated PCG inflatable boats, confiscated cargo and seriously wounded one Filipino soldier.

This is not an isolated outburst by some crazed Chinese crew. It follows a pattern of measured escalation that will continue until Filipino forces decide to break and run.

Previous to this latest skirmish, Chinese militia grabbed food supplies air dropped for the Marines holding the country’s outpost, an embarrassingly dilapidated ship intentionally grounded over two decades ago to stake the country’s territorial claim.

Last month, the Chinese Coast Guard also announced that Filipino fishermen who stray into waters Beijing claims will be arrested and detained without trial. With that announcement, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) has been forced to deploy its limited sea assets to protect our small fishermen from arrest.

I anticipated in this space last month that the outpost at the BRP Sierra Madre will be our most vulnerable point in the entire West Philippine Sea theater. It might have seemed a smart idea two decades ago to ground an expendable Philippine Navy ship on an uninhabitable shoal and then keep that ship on the active Navy list to make an attack against it an attack on our military.

Over the two or so decades the BRP Sierra Madre remained grounded, a ghastly carcass of a ship, it was impossible for our navy to repair it. Chinese militia vessels block delivery of construction materials to that forsaken shoal where our ship sits. They allowed only food supplies to get through to our brave Marines sheltered in the rusting hull.

Meanwhile, China began building impressive military bases by reclaiming nearby reefs and shoals. These bases are complete with runways, missile launch sites and fortifications. An armada of Chinese “maritime militia” vessels keep the bases supplied continuously.

Meanwhile, the fact that we need to continuously resupply our small detachment aboard the grounded vessel means our movements are predictable. If we miss deliveries, our troops will go hungry and quickly dehydrate. The PCG, given its own limitations, has had to hire vulnerable civilian boats to make the deliveries. We saw how these small boats fail to withstand the CCG’s water cannons.

We have an unsustainable situation regarding this Marine outpost and the Chinese know it. They will keep adding tactical pressure on our vulnerable supply line until we agree to tow away the rotting ship and withdraw our outpost.

So far, it seems, we have not found a solution to this problem.

Discrepancy

The local government of Porac claims they did not know of the operations of a large illegal POGO facility in the town despite the fact it hires hundreds of locals. In the same vein, the local government of Malabon could not seem to locate hundreds of millions of its own money.

In its Annual Audit Report on Malabon for 2023, released recently, the Commission on Audit (COA) pointed out a yawning discrepancy in the city’s financial records. The discrepancy amounts to over P392 million.

The same report likewise flagged as “unreliable” the Cash in Bank (CIB) the city government reported. In its year-end statement, the city government claimed a balance of P2.183 billion. When the auditors checked with the depositary banks, they found a discrepancy of P24.877 million.

The money is not necessarily lost. According to the COA, the discrepancies may be attributable to “absence of reconciliation between the subsidiary ledger (SL) and the cash book.” The state auditors likewise noted that there was “a significant delay in the preparation and submission of bank reconciliation statements.”

Even if the money is not lost, the glaring discrepancies point to sloppy work by Malabon’s City Accounting Department (CAD).

COA asked the city mayor to require the CAD to properly document and reconcile booking of the three bank accounts declared closed by the Philippine National Bank. The mayor was also asked to require the CAD to regularly prepare and submit the bank reconciliation statements within the period prescribed by COA circulars.

There were two other accounts that appear unrecorded in the city’s cash book, the principal record of all the city’s money inflows and outflows. These accounts are maintained with the LBP. The cash book, administered by the City Treasury Department, is always presumed to be current.

The auditors urge the city officials to conduct regular reconciliation of their respective records consistent with the requirements of law. This is an order to shape up.

In addition, the auditors found out that Malabon’s Property, Plant and Equipment (PPE) accounts amounting to P4.265 billion is similarly “unreliable.” The fault lies in the practice of lumping together all the PPE items without clear description and simply describing them as “Beginning Balances.”

Under this rather sloppy practice, Malabon reports “Beginning Balances” of P37.7638 million without recognizing items in the physical count that amount to very much more. About 41 units of PPE items are reported without corresponding costs along with missing properties valued in the millions.

The rather sloppy accounting and reporting practices noted by the COA ought to be frowned upon, This is not how a modern city should be run.

COA calls on the Malabon LGU to do a complete inventory of its assets and a prompt updating of its accounts.