Where is the outrage in Balamban?

It was painful to see land tax scam victims recount how they were duped of thousands of pesos by two clerks and the Balamban municipal assessor. Receipts of their tax payments for the sale or purchase of land were fake.

It was especially pitiful to see Balamban municipal councilors try to explain to the victims that the town council’s inquiry last Tuesday wouldn’t get them a refund or ensure penalties for the smart operators.

The victims, mostly land owners, won’t lose their shirts for failing to remit payments to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) but they are sore victims of corruption, which makes this everybody’s business.

Cash payments, initially seen to range from P3,000 to P30,000, were received by municipal assessor Teresita Yray and staff members Sheribeth Melgar and Lucelle Agua, who assured off-duty service of remitting payments to the BIR and attending to related paperwork.

The three have disappeared.

They conveniently vanished two weeks after angry taxpayers flocked to the town hall June 15 with their discovery of fake receipts.

Why did town officials protect them, instead of pounce on them?

Yray, after being allowed to take a two-week leave, was allowed to resign. Melgar, a job-order worker, didn’t get her contract renewed by the mayor at the end of June. Agua recently took an indefinite leave.

If someone’s trying to turn down the heat, they’ve been doing a good job so far.

Ironically, officials are trying to turn the tables on taxpayers. It’s your fault to be dealing with a fixer, they said.

During the town hall meeting, they emphasized the risk of dealing with unauthorized facilitators. This was a weak-kneed response to bare-faced graft.

Councilors ended up advising complainants to go file individual cases with the Office of the Ombudsman.

Yes, the residents can do that and should.

They should also demand to know why their sense of outrage of being cheated is not shared by Balamban municipal officials, who are more busy marking the distinction of the actions of former personnel as falling “outside” their job description.

They should ask why the town assessor, directly under the office of the mayor, was allowed to moonlight with staff as fixers.

In a small town like Balamban, it’s difficult to believe the mayor, Ace Binghay, and the mayor before him, his father Alex, didn’t know this “extra service” was going on.

The mayor’s first reaction to being asked by Cebu Daily News about the involvement of the assessor’s staff and why they were on leave was to say they were considered “like family.”

What effort, pray tell, did Balamban municipal officials take to protect taxpayers and run after the suspects?

Tuesday’s town hall “inquiry” was an exercise of blowing hot air—anger and empty gestures—instead of the real job of getting to the truth.