Give what is due

During his first State of the Nation Address, President Benigno Aquino III exposed the greed of executives sitting at the top of government-owned and controlled firms who awarded themselves with  bonuses, allowances and other perks.

The fallout from the President’s speech included the rationalization of the money that was being given to the honchos of these firms. This was part of a broader policy of fiscal discipline on the part of the administration that has resulted first in a shrinking national budget deficit and now a surplus in our foreign reserves.

With news that judges, prosecutors and court personnel in Mandaue City were ordered by the Commission on Audit (COA) to pay income taxe on allowances they received from the local government, one can almost hear the public outcry: “Just about time.”

“The non-imposition of taxes on the honoraria or incentive pay deprived the government from using the resources that could have been derived from the taxes to finance projects for the benefit of the general public,” said state auditor Cymbeline Celia Chiong-Uy in her Feb. 24 letter to Mandaue City Mayor Jonas Cortes.

If anything, the COA’s finding that cash was seeping from the people’s treasury by way of unpaid taxes from workers in the judicial branch (which may be happening not only in the rest of Cebu province but across the country), is no mere irony.

Personnel who are supposed to embody justice and  the virtue of giving what is due, have gone off tangent and set poor  examples of  citizenship.

The COA finding could not have come at a worse time.

The Supreme Court and by extension the entire judicial branch’s public approval ratings have taken a beating in the wake of the impeachment trial at the Senate of Chief Justice Renato Corona.

Pundits and conspiracy theorists  may be getting the hang of interpreting the COA order in  Mandaue City as part of an executive department-led demolition job on a co-equal government branch.

(COA in Manila recently forbade the sale to the nation’s capital of a property that Corona reportedly owned.)

But to a nation starving for equity and clean governance, a people who finds out now and then that their court employees have been receiving so much and giving so little, what COA ordered the Mandaue City court workers to do is simply an act of Lady Justice tipping her scales in favor of the people.