The prosecution treats this as a scandal — which it is not — since it is the system working as designed.
A box labeled “confidential funds” was presented to the impeachment court on Wednesday, 5 August, containing documents concerning the confidential funds of the OVP and DepEd from 2022 to 2023, as part of the prosecution’s evidence for the first impeachment article against Vice President Sara Duterte.
Aram Lascano
The prosecution wanted the country to believe that a confidential fund is only legitimate if it stops being confidential, which is a contradiction, considering it is at the heart of the Senate impeachment trial’s second week.
Consider what actually happened when Commission on Audit (CoA) accountant Roderick Wamil took the stand. He had no security clearance, thus, he could not examine the substance of the intelligence gathered, the identity of the informants, or the relationship between an informant and a handler.
He could only check receipts: how many boxes of medicine, how much rice, how many reams of paper were used.
The prosecution treats this as a scandal which it is not, since it is the system working as designed.
Confidential funds exist because some information cannot survive disclosure, not as a way to hide theft, but because of a security necessity, as a name on a piece of paper can get an informant killed.
It is not even an argument invented during the trial. It is written into the CoA Joint Memorandum Circular 2015-01, the same rulebook that governs intelligence spending at the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Philippine National Police, and the Office of the President, where confidential and intelligence funds run into the billions of pesos, a fact strangely absent from the exchanges on the floor of the Senate court.
Much has been made of aliases, which are used to protect the identity of an informant. Senators want to know the one-line names cited. They will not get an answer, and they should not expect one.
An alias in this case was not meant to confuse, since it is the entire point of confidential reporting. If the identity of a source were meant to be disclosed, the fund would not need to be confidential in the first place.
Treating the use of a pseudonym as evidence of wrongdoing gets the logic backward. A confidential fund that produces a fully named, fully documented paper trail is a confidential fund that failed at its only job.
The prosecution keeps asking for receipts that do not exist and were never supposed to exist, according to former University of the East College of Law Dean Amado Valdez.
The real standard, the one written into the circular and which every field officer operates under, is reasonableness. Was the amount proportionate to the mission? Did the operation produce a result?
Itemized certainty was never meant to be cash-basis spending, informal in-kind rewards to informants, or a minimal paper trail by design; it is not considered evasion for intelligence fund purposes.
A retired intelligence officer who spent a career running field operations put it plainly: the goal was never to avoid accountability; it was to avoid exposing the operatives and informants whose safety depended on secrecy.
The Office of the President has confidential and intelligence funds of roughly P4 billion. Congress liquidates its own operating expenses through certification alone; no receipts are required. Neither institution is on trial.
Only the Vice President is.
If the principle is transparency and accountability, it should apply everywhere confidential funds are spent; if not, that can be considered targeting, dressed up as due diligence.
While the Senate spends its December sessions dissecting a contested P125 million, the flood control scam, trillions of pesos, an entire generation of public works funding, gone, sits largely unexamined.
No senator has organized a similar procession of witnesses. No one has demanded an accounting on that scale. The country was robbed once by contractors and the officials who protected them, and it is being distracted a second time by a trial that treats an alias as if it were the crime of the century.
There is a real danger buried in the trial, and it has nothing to do with whether Wamil had clearance. Every hour the Senate spends prying open the operational details of a confidential fund, according to Valdez, the code names, the liquidation timing, the informant-handling procedures, is an hour spent handing a manual to anyone who wishes this country’s intelligence services ill. National security does not improve because a senator got a good soundbite. It erodes.
The public deserves accountability, not theater.
More so, it does not deserve selective confidentiality while the far larger theft of the flood control scam waits, conveniently, for another day.
