Making the world smaller for the corrupt
For too long, agencies have treated information as something to guard rather than share. Records sit in one office away from the office that needs them. That habit has served the corrupt well.
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For too long, agencies have treated information as something to guard rather than share. Records sit in one office away from the office that needs them. That habit has served the corrupt well.
On 29 September, the Office of the Ombudsman and the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management signed a data-sharing agreement. On paper, it is a technical arrangement between two agencies. In practice, it changes how we go after corruption in government procurement.
Previously, when an Ombudsman investigator needed procurement records — whether a bid notice, a notice of award, a contract, or a supplier’s registration papers — we had to write a letter and wait. Sometimes the wait was days. Sometimes it was weeks. In an investigation, that delay is costly. Documents disappear. Memories fade. Respondents prepare.
Under the new agreement, authorized Ombudsman personnel will have direct, read-only access to PhilGEPS, the government’s electronic procurement system. We will see the full procurement cycle, from planning documents to implementation records. We will see who registered as a supplier, what they submitted and who the beneficial owners behind the corporate bidders really are.
Work that once took weeks of correspondence can now be done in an afternoon. PS-DBM deserves credit for championing this. It did not treat its data as territory to be defended. It treated it as a public resource that should serve accountability.
That is the mindset the government as a whole needs to adopt. For too long, agencies have treated information as something to guard rather than share. Records sit in one office away from the office that needs them. That habit had served the corrupt well. Corruption thrives in the gaps between agencies, when one hand does not know what the other is signing.
Every reform that opens up government meets with the same objections: It is too complicated, too risky, not how things have always been done. We have heard these arguments before. We can no longer afford to listen to them.
The point of this agreement is simple: to make the world smaller for those who abuse the system. Schemes like bidding under different company names, splitting contracts to avoid public bidding and hiding behind layers of dummy corporations all depend on distance. They assume no one will connect the dots. When the full procurement record is visible, the same names, addresses and patterns begin to surface. There are fewer places to hide.
That is why I expect this agreement to work first as a deterrent. Anyone who uploads a document to PhilGEPS should now assume the Ombudsman can read it.
This is not a license for fishing expeditions. Access is role-based, logged, monitored and bound by the Data Privacy Act. The Ombudsman asks transparency of others, and we must hold ourselves to the same standard.
The Filipino people have waited long enough for a government that does not hide from them. This agreement is one step toward giving them one.
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