The House of Representatives plans to verify whether the nearly 1,000 supposed legitimate recipients of Vice President Sara Duterte’s multi-million confidential funds, whose records appear in the Philippine Statistics Authority’s database, had actually received the funds in light of the ongoing preparations for her upcoming impeachment trial.

In a briefing on Monday, House Deputy Majority Leader Paolo Ortega V underscored the need to identify these “non-spurious” individuals to determine whether they obtained a portion of Duterte’s secret funds, indicating that they might merely share a similar name in the PSA’s records.

“We have noticed a trend where most of them have no birth, death, or marriage records in the PSA…We also need to verify if they actually received the funds. So, it's not just the ones without names,” he told reporters in Filipino.

“Perhaps, we will do a mini-investigation to that though it’s already at the committee level so we can also make a request [to the PSA],” he added.

According to the La Union lawmaker, a total of 942 names — 670 from the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and 272 from the Department of Education (DepEd) — who have been confirmed in the PSA’s archives are now under scrutiny.

Ortega had bared a set of alleged bogus names listed as beneficiaries of Duterte’s offices, including “Mary Grace Piattos,” “Jay Kamote,” “Miggy Mango,” “Mico Harina,” “Ralph Josh Bacon,” and “Erwin Q. Ewan,” among others, whose relevant records do not exist in the PSA’s database.

A previous verification from the PSA revealed that of 1,992 supposed recipients of confidential funds of OVP, 1,322 had no birth records, 1,456 had no marriage records, and 1,593 had no death records.

Subsequent results from the PSA further revealed that out of 677 names listed as beneficiaries of DepEd’s confidential funds, 405 had no birth records, 445 lacked marriage certificates, and 508 had no death certificates.

The controversy surrounding Duterte’s confidential funds has been grabbing headlines in recent months, with lawmakers suggesting some of the names mimic those of celebrities and grocery items, fueling their suspicions that the acknowledgment receipts were fabricated or hastily prepared to justify the use of the funds.

Duterte was accused of misappropriating P612.5 million in confidential funds allocated to the OVP (P500 million) and the DepEd (P112.5 million) in 2022 and 2023. The alleged irregularities in the use of such funds were among the grounds cited by the House of Representatives to impeach her on 5 February.

Vice President Duterte has vehemently denied corruption allegations involving her confidential funds and cast doubt on the veracity of the names that Ortega had claimed as beneficiaries of the same.

Supporters of the VP also suggested that these names might be merely aliases used by intelligence assets of her office, citing the confidential nature of the funds.

However, Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro, a House prosecutor, argued that using fake identities to hide the personalities of the real recipients is not authorized under Joint Circular No. 2015-01, governing the use of confidential and intelligence funds.

She also dismissed speculations that documents may have already been tampered with, asserting that they were produced by the Commission on Audit itself, which had flagged the utilization of her P125 million confidential funds in 2022, and not lawmakers who were part of the investigation.

Moreover, Luistro clarified that they only learned about the so-called bogus names when the House launched the probe into the alleged irregularities in the use of her secret funds, backed by the CoA findings, with the documents only being submitted to the panel following a subpoena.