VP’s Trust Deficit

Acknowledgement receipts issued to recipients whose names read like a grocery list — and yes, that included the now infamous Mary Grace Piattos — were dated months, in some cases a full year, after the funds they supposedly documented were released. One receipt predated the confidential funds’ release. That was not a clerical hiccup. That was a paper trail assembled backward, after the fact, to fit a story that needed explaining.

Here is the deeper problem, and it is one the Vice President’s defenders have never adequately answered: confidential and intelligence funds exist under a legal framework — Joint Circular No. 2015-01 — precisely because they are not audited in the normal way.

The public is barred from seeing the receipts for themselves. They cannot ask who received the money or why. That opacity is the price we pay, as a democracy, for genuine national security operations. It is not a blank check. It is a trust extended on the condition that internal safeguards — physical and financial plans, liquidation reports, proper documentation — actually work.

What Wamil described was an office that either couldn’t or wouldn’t meet even that minimum threshold of “strict compliance,” his own words for what should have been the floor, not the ceiling, of accountability.

And here’s what should trouble every Filipino who is not already invested in the political outcome: Duterte’s predecessors in the vice presidency — Jejomar Binay and Leni Robredo — never had nor asked for confidential funds. Neither did prior education secretaries.

In his testimony before the Senate impeachment court, Wamil said that during the time he served at the ICFAO from September 2014 to February 2024 covering the three vice presidents only Duterte received confidential funds which he audited.

Wamil also testified that Duterte was the only DepEd secretary who had confidential funds that he audited, “because it was only during her tenure that the DepEd received confidential funds.”

Sara Duterte was the first Vice President to receive such funds and to have her office audited by CoA’s confidential funds unit — which found irregularities within months. That is not incidental. That is the entire case in miniature.

So can we presume, from what has transpired so far, that money meant for confidential government operations was misused?

The honest answer is that the documentary record — dates that don’t align, spending speeds that strain physical plausibility, receipts issued to figures whose existence and function remain murky — points toward exactly the kind of “hasty encashment” that has been described.

Presumption is not proof, yes. But presumption grounded on CoA’s findings, in the OVP’s own submissions, in timelines the OVP itself provided, is not idle speculation either. It is where the evidence currently sits, and the burden now rests squarely on the defense to explain it away.

Public office is a public trust. That phrase is not in our Constitution for no flimsy reason; it is the entire justification for confidential funds existing in the first place.

If P612.5 million allocated for national security purposes cannot be satisfactorily accounted for through even the most basic standards of documentary integrity, then the issue extends far beyond public disappointment. It raises a more fundamental question: whether the Office of the Vice President — the nation’s second-highest office — is still being exercised as a public trust, or has it come to regard public funds as an expense account shielded by the cover of national security.