The cost of thievery

Last Monday, it took one of our colleagues nine hours to get home to Valenzuela from our office in Parañaque.

Driving from our office at 6 p.m., he had taken the Skyway where there was normal traffic and exited at the northernmost end. There he got trapped in carmageddon due to massive flooding at the North Luzon Expressway.

Nothing moved until around midnight, when NLEX personnel opened a spot between the northbound and southbound lanes, allowing the trapped vehicles to make a U-turn.

It took him another three hours to negotiate the flooded streets in Valenzuela before he finally managed to stagger home.

I asked him why flooding had worsened on the NLEX. The only reason he could see, he said, was that open spaces on both sides of the expressway where rainfall used to drain had disappeared along with waterways and catchments, replaced by concrete structures on pavement.

There must be engineering interventions to preserve natural water catchments and creeks during property development, or else install manmade drains and other flood control facilities that are integrated into existing ones in surrounding areas.

Unfortunately, we don’t have an integrated flood control system to speak of, even as we spend billions every year for projects earmarked by thieves in government supposedly for flood control.

Dredging projects in particular are so easy to fake, because they are difficult to audit. How can you tell if an estero or river has been dredged as stipulated in a budget item?

In my part of town, we see heavy dredging machines actually doing their work along rivers and creeks. Still, how do we know if project specifications for which payment is made are being met, or even if there are such specs?

The potential for corruption is so huge that Panfilo Lacson and Franklin Drilon, when they were senators in the 18th Congress, managed to remove appropriations for dredging and related flood control projects from the national budget during the bicameral conference.

But in the next Congress, the projects reemerged “with a vengeance,” Lacson said. He has vowed to look into the utilization of P10 billion allocated for flood control to a town with a population of only 10,000, and P1.9 billion to just one barangay in a small municipality in Oriental Mindoro.

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Last weekend, I went to a mall that was shown in a video inundated recently by flood. The piano where elderly folks normally play was no longer there.

Maybe it was being cleaned after being affected by the flood. Or maybe it has been relocated to safer ground, because who knows if the flood could happen again? Since it opened years ago, it was the first time that I’ve seen that mall’s interior flooded.

And it looks like extreme rainfall has become the norm. This makes it all the more important to have efficient flood control systems in place.

So much of our taxes appropriated supposedly for flood control, however, went down the drain. Or more accurately, went to the pockets of thieves in government.

But thanks to recent scandals over the misuse of confidential funds and the brazen mangling of the 2025 national budget, more and more people knowledgeable in budgeting and taxation are applying their expertise to the scrutiny of the General Appropriations Act.

These experts are sharing with civil society and the public their analyses of funding hocus-pocus, step-by-step in the 2024 and 2025 budget proceedings – from the submission of the National Expenditure Program by the executive, to the deliberations on the NEP by the House of Representatives and the Senate, and finally by Congress’ Chamber of Secrets where all the budgeting voodoo takes place, the bicameral conference committee.

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Apart from the most obvious anomalies, such as public works getting a higher allocation than the entire education sector and the zero subsidy for the Philippine Health Insurance Corp., people are also learning about the ways by which budget allocations for the turfs of lawmakers are used to buy political support.

Such politically influenced allocations make it difficult for the national government to plan for the long term in a coordinated way that benefits the national good rather than parochial interests.

We end up with a patchwork quilt of projects and programs that are designed to be substandard and requiring regular replacement or repair work, with opportunities for kickbacks at every phase.

This “budget layering” is the MO detailed in a recent report on the supposed division of tax-funded spoils in the Senate.

Congress is not unique in this racket. Layering or breaking up project contracts into smaller parts or implementation phases has been done for years in many government agencies. Not just to open more opportunities for kickbacks or ghost projects, but also to avoid the P50-million threshold that would warrant indictment for non-bailable plunder rather than the lesser offense of graft, in case the thieves get caught.

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Obviously, such budgeting voodoo calls for concealment – if not from outright scrutiny of the fund juggling, then from the eyes of implementation auditors.

Among the toughest projects to audit, from start to finish, are those for flood control. But it’s not impossible, if project implementation is properly monitored.

One of my colleagues, for example, lamented that instead of dredging a creek near her home, the bottom was paved with concrete, making the waterway shallower. The banks made of earth were also turned into concrete walls with no provision for proper drainage.

Residents didn’t know enough to think that something was amiss, until their community became regularly inundated with torrential flooding that took a long time to subside. Now they think they know what went wrong.

Can taxpayers still go after the contractors and planners of such projects?

If such projects can be tricky to monitor for proper implementation and completion, they can be subjected to a performance audit. Meaning, are they fulfilling the project objective of flood mitigation?

The extreme floods we have been experiencing regularly are proof of thievery on a grand scale.

We know how much substandard or, worse, ghost flood control projects are costing us – not just in terms of public funds, but also in terms of lives lost and property and crops damaged. It’s time to put an end to the thievery.