Following the trail of unexplained gaps in the Bicameral Conference Committee report, which served as the draft of the General Appropriations Bill, Ferdinand Topacio, National Chairman of Citizens Crime Watch, stated that those who manipulated the 2025 national budget could be identified through the investigative powers of the Ombudsman.

Topacio and former Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez led the filing of a criminal complaint against leaders in the House of Representatives for the unlawful insertions in the budget.

The P241 billion insertions that filled the blanks left in the Bicameral Conference Committee mostly consisted of soft projects that are difficult to quantify in terms of money.

Among the items that Topacio and company uncovered were projects that pertained to farm inputs, fertilizers, and other products in which the Department of Agriculture is involved.

Topacio recalled that, similarly, the fertilizer fund scam, in which a huge amount of money was suspected to have been diverted to election funds, was revealed.

According to Alvarez, these are the usual suspects when there are insertions in the budget that are difficult to monitor and easy to manipulate.

“The mere fact that these amounts were inserted in the budget is already a scandal or a scam, so to speak, because it is not what was approved by the representatives of the people in both chambers,” according to Topacio, a DAILY TRIBUNE columnist.

Based on their petition, Topacio held that there should not have been insertions in the first place. He argued that there was an undue exercise of legislative power and that a crime was committed under the Revised Penal Code and Republic Act 3019, also known as the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act.

The complaint filed with the Ombudsman contained a lot of John and Jane Does because “as of now we have not identified the people who have inserted the amounts that went into the missing items in the Bicam report,” he said.

Topacio said that those not mandated to take part in the budget process may also be liable for tampering with the legislative document, which is the General Appropriations Bill.

“Of course, we cannot expect the main respondents to do it themselves. They will have to direct these insertions to persons under their direct control and supervision.”

Topacio recounted difficulties in obtaining the documents related to the 2025 national budget as he alleged stonewalling from certain sectors, which he did not name.

“When we got hold of the enrolled bill, it was evident that it had blanks in the form of a lack of signatures from those who were supposed to sign it,” which, according to Topacio, is another glaring anomaly.

“That is another cause for alarm, but in due time, hopefully, with the Ombudsman exercising its powers to gather information, we would find out the identities of the actual persons who placed the insertions and who gave the order for them to do so,” the ace lawyer contended.

Finding out what was inserted that totaled P241 billion necessarily elicits the question of who did the insertions and where the instructions came from.

The Ombudsman owes it to the public to find out “sooner rather than later.”

This is a crime against the Filipino people and the entire nation, according to Topacio.

For years, the national budget has been subjected to abuses and turned into a conduit for legislators to revive the pork barrel system.

In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the Priority Development Assistance Program of legislators and schemes similar to it are unconstitutional.

Not even a collusion between the Executive and the Legislative branches of government can change the illegal nature of pork barrel.