UP FOR SCRUTINY These screengrabs of acknowledgment receipts, already redacted when shown in a Nov. 5 House hearing on the expenditures of the Office of the Vice President, have roused suspicions that they were issued by just one person using a false name. One receipt was signed by a “Mary Grace Piattos,” whose surname sounds like a brand of potato chips. —Courtesy of the House of Representatives
MANILA, Philippines — The House panel investigating the alleged misuse of confidential funds in the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd) plans to tap experts who can look into the authenticity of receipts submitted to state auditors to justify the expenditures.
This emerged as lawmakers on Monday said they had raised P1 million in cash as a reward for anyone who could present the person named Mary Grace Piattos, supposedly one of the recipients of part of the P125 million in confidential funds allotted to Vice President Sara Duterte’s office in 2022. Government auditors earlier told the panel that the amount was spent in just 11 days.
Manila Rep. Joel Chua, chair of the House committee on good government and public accountability, also stressed the importance of having Duterte in today’s hearing, even after she had sent word that she would just submit a sworn statement.
READ: P1-M reward for information on Mary Grace Piattos – House lawmakers
Duterte, who also headed DepEd until she resigned from that agency in June, had snubbed earlier invitations for her to appear in the House inquiry.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Chua said Duterte’s affidavit, in lieu of her presence, would not be enough because she still had to answer questions that could arise from her statement and other concerns in the OVP and DepEd during her tenure as secretary.
“Actually Mary Grace Piattos’ name was only highlighted because, as Cong (Romeo) Acop said, it was like two merged food brands,” Chua said explaining the purpose of the P1-million reward for anyone who could produce Piattos.
“More than that, it’s not the only problem we saw [in the acknowledgment receipts]. It’s just one of them. There’s also the 158 acknowledgment receipts, which were issued on dates when there was no confidential fund.”
He was referring to the 158 receipts that bore dates in December 2023 instead of in December 2022, when the payments should have been made out of the P125-million confidential fund of the OVP.
The amount was used up by the OVP in just 11 days, from Dec. 21 to 31, 2022, purportedly for the payment of rewards, purchase of information and supplies, and rental of safe houses.
“We are considering submitting the penmanship to expert witnesses,” Chua said, noting that the committee would coordinate with the Philippine Statistics Authority to validate the names on the acknowledgment receipts, including Piattos’.
“So our theory is that these [acknowledgment receipts] only came out after the Commission on Audit (COA) issued an audit observation memorandum. So because of that, they panicked to justify the liquidation and produced many [acknowledgment receipts],” Chua said.
‘Highly suspicious’
He said the “clerical error” could have been committed in the rush to produce the receipts, which would normally bear different names, amounts, payment purposes, and dates to justify the P125-million expenditure.
According to Chua, the pen strokes in the names and signatures also looked similar, as if only one person wrote them using the same pen.
“[This is] why the [acknowledgment receipts] submitted were highly suspicious,” Chua said, as pointed out by Antipolo City Rep. Romeo Acop in the Nov. 5 hearing.
Snack brands
Piattos’ acknowledgment receipt was among 787 submitted by the OVP to the COA that either had no names printed or bore only signatures and 302 others that had unreadable or dubiously sounding names.
Aside from Piattos, there were also “Nova,” “Oishi,” and “Tempura”—which are also brands of some popular snacks.
Some of the receipts merely had the initials “AAS” and “JOV.”
Piattos supposedly received P70,000 as a reward, apparently in the form of medicine, as indicated in the acknowledgment receipt dated Dec. 30, 2022.
Also during the Nov. 5 hearing, lawyer Gloria Camora of the COA’s Intelligence and Confidential Funds Audit Office confirmed that 158 acknowledgment receipts for payments totaling P23.8 million bore erroneous dates.
The payments were included in the COA’s notice of disallowance for P73 million of the OVP’s P125-million confidential funds. —with a report from Inquirer Research