Secret funds

Slapstick names and outright tomfoolery are the least hijinks we’d expect from sinister secretive schemes to pocket public funds.

But I guess that happens only in hugely entertaining Western and Korean government conspiracy flicks, where imaginative schemes unravel in the end with the schemers meeting poetic justice.

Here in our demented showbiz-morality republic, however, the story unravels as soon as the movie starts, without even the courtesy of giving us any suspense on how we’re being robbed.

Such is the case with the Veep’s unaccounted for confidential funds where some quarters insist we shouldn’t believe suspicions that confidential fund beneficiaries strangely named Chippy McDonald, Fernando Tempura, Carlos Miguel Oishi, Raymunda Jane Nova and Mary Grace Piattos aren’t ghosts.

It got even more dreadful in the past few days.

Aside from the aforementioned ghosts, the Philippine Statistics Authority reported that of the 677 names listed as recipients of the Veep’s P612.5-billion confidential funds, 405 turned up as certified ghosts too.

Yet, while a number of us guffaw at the hilarious touch in using “chichirya’’ brands and whatever inventive names as aliases, ironically the joke was on us all along.

We will realize that we had been mocked and ridiculed once we see that all those unbelievable aliases were actually disrespectful of our innate ability to spot fakery.

They’re saying we’re dupes, caricaturing many of us as no more than ignorant asses easily led by the nose to believe that untouchable political demigods have all the right to habitually fleece the public treasury!

But those same demigods can be resisted even by lowly, scared bureaucrats. This by the simple bureaucratic expedient that by law bureaucrats have got to keep unassailable documentary records whenever public monies are dispensed.

A point which former Commission on Audit commissioner Heidi Mendoza recently pointed out regarding the use of aliases in confidential fund operations.

While the Office of the Vice President, Mendoza told a TV interviewer, can say that “Mary Grace Piattos” and the rest of the ghosts were mere aliases, their real identities can still be effectively checked.

“The special disbursing officer (of confidential funds) is required to keep a logbook where both the alias and the real identity of the (recipients of the monies) should be listed,” Mendoza said.

Now, even if it is really necessary that confidential fund recipients remain anonymous, Mendoza said such sensitive information could first be “desensitized” by the Department of National Defense, the one government entity presumably solely cognizant of “intelligence” matters. But despite this potent bureaucratic weapon, accountable bureaucrats are crashing out by pleading ignorance and relying on the baneful excuse that their bosses ordered them to do it.

The law, however, presumes malversation takes place when an accountable officer cannot explain where public funds in their care were spent, said a congressman.

“When you are asked where the funds went and you cannot answer, the law presumes that you pocketed the money,” the congressman bluntly said.

Still, several bureaucrats, probably out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, are willing to take the fall, and despite real threats they’ll probably end up being charged with the no-bail crime of plunder alongside their bosses.

Given all this, the struggle is indeed real when seeking answers to the central question of “where did the confidential and intelligence funds go?”

A struggle that doesn’t even account for the fact that immediately instituting effective safeguards against exploiting and abusing secret funds isn’t easy.

Moreover, the struggle is also being momentarily derailed by the concerted attempts of those accused of abusive behavior to gaslight us by insisting that they are victims of a well-planned political persecution.

But such constipated attempts to evade legitimate questions about accountability and transparency are failing since, as one congressman recently wryly concluded, the mood of the times seems to indicate that we’re all starting to face “the reality that not all those elected to public office can be trusted.”