Transparent cheating?

You pay taxes.

The government takes the money and builds roads, schools, flood control with it.

Now suddenly everybody wants to know where the money went. Very curious.

Bongbong wants to make that easier to answer.

Government now has a website called Compass. The idea: put government spending up there so ordinary people can see what happened to their money.

Very radical. Your money—and you’re allowed to see where it went.

Say the government announces a P100-million bridge. You should be able to go online and see whether P100 million was really approved, how much was released, who got the contract, whether they got paid, whether the damn bridge was actually built.

We already had transparency, by the way. FOI. Transparency seals. PDFs. Government has been very transparent for years provided you had six hours and excellent eyesight and absolutely nothing else to do.

Compass was launched in June. Now Bongbong has signed EO 126 ordering national government agencies to regularly upload their budgets, spending, project info into the system.

Because right now it’s a mess. You want to know where your money went? The budget is over here. The contract is over there. The payment is God knows where. Bongbong wants the whole thing put together.

Your city hall? Province? They don’t have to join.

There is also a proposal in Congress. Cadena. Citizens Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability.

Not a law yet. Senate has agreed to it. The House still has to sign on.

Very simple idea: government should be required to show us where our money went, and nobody should be able to quietly alter the records later. Blockchain the budget. Very futuristic.

Say government records show a bridge that cost P100 million. That record is shared across several authorized computers. So, Computer 1: P100 million. Computer 2: P100 million. Another authorized computer: P100 million.

Six months later, somebody decides P100 million is looking a little suspicious and changes one computer to show P50 million. Problem is the other computers still say P100 million.

It’s like giving 10 people the same receipt. You can alter yours all you want. The other nine are still standing there holding P100 million. That’s blockchain.

Very clever. One problem. Who said what you originally wrote was the truth?

You buy a chair for P1,000. You steal P9,000. Then you type into Cadena: “Chair, P10,000.”

Blockchain says, “OK, sir, P10,000. Locked in.” No one can secretly change it later.

Fantastic. Except you lied before blockchain ever touched it. The chair was P1,000. Blockchain doesn’t know that. You told it P10,000, so it faithfully protects P10,000.

If they made the dirty deal before they entered the numbers, Cadena can end up keeping a beautiful permanent record of the dirty deed.

Ghost projects? Amateur hour. Build a terrible little road for P5 million. Charge P50 million. Take pictures. Upload the contract, the payment, upload everything. Somebody comes looking for the ghost project, you say, “What ghost? There. A road. Look at it. Everything is on Cadena.”

Oh, well. Excuse me. It’s on Cadena. Since when did being on a website mean nobody stole anything?

Cadena knows this is a problem. The bill provides penalties for people who deliberately put false or misleading budget info into the system.

But suppose everything is uploaded, nobody changed anything, everybody behaved, who’s going to read all of it!?

Government uploads 50,000 contracts. Fantastic. Now what? We’re all auditors? I have work.

Which one is crooked? No. 6? No. 891? No. 47,222? Am I supposed to spend Sunday checking the price of cement in Nueva Ecija?

You wouldn’t even have to hide the bad contract anymore. Put it online. Put 49,999 normal contracts around it. There it is. Completely public. Good luck finding the little b**tard.

Nothing is hidden. That’s the genius of it. You showed me everything, and I still couldn’t find anything.

Cadena would be fantastic for transparency; would also be fantastic for very transparent cheating.