House panel: PSA probe shows OVP receipts ‘faked’

Manila Rep. Joel Chua —Niño Jesus Orbeta

MANILA, Philippines — The head of the House of Representatives’ blue ribbon committee suggested on Sunday that evidence from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that the receipts submitted by the office of Vice President (OVP) Sara Duterte may have been “manufactured.”

“This certification from the PSA leaves little doubt,” said Manila Rep. Joel Chua, chairperson of the House committee on good government and public accountability.

“If these names cannot be found in the civil registry, it strongly suggests they do not exist. The [receipts] may have been manufactured to justify the disbursement of confidential funds,” he argued.

READ: ‘Mary Grace Piattos’ does not exist, PSA confirms

“These findings raise a critical question: if the recipients don’t exist, where did the money go? This is not just a clerical error; this points to a deliberate effort to misuse public funds,” he added.

The situation appeared to be the same in the Department of Education (DepEd), headed by Duterte from June 2022 until last July, which submitted to the blue ribbon committee a list of 677 alleged names of fund recipients, but 405 of the names had no records with the PSA.

Chua and his committee asked the PSA to verify the supposed OVP recipients after the agency submitted its findings on the DepEd list of recipients.

The OVP list was also submitted to the Commission on Audit (COA) to justify the Vice President’s spending of P500 million in confidential funds from December 2022 to September 2023.

Who received the money?

Like Mary Grace Piattos, 1,322 of 1,992—nearly two-thirds, or 66 percent, of the recipients of the OVP’s confidential funds—had no existing birth records on its database while 670 names were placed by the PSA under a category of “most likely matched” where they had one or more birth records or had multiple namesakes.

Chua said that the results of his panel’s verification request were detailed in a Dec. 11 letter he received from National Statistician and Civil Registrar General Claire Dennis Mapa.

The 1,992 names appeared in the receipts submitted by the OVP to the COA to justify its spending for payment of rewards, safe house rentals, travel expenses as well as the purchase of information, supplies, medicine and food aid from December 2022 through the first three quarters of 2023.