FILE PHOTO/INQUIRER.net
MANILA, Philippines – The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) admitted on Thursday that its lack of resources had prevented them to immediately detect “fraud” in the registration of alleged bogus nongovernment organizations (NGOs) linked to jailed businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles.
When the P10 billion “pork barrel” scam broke out last year, SEC chairperson Teresita Herbosa told the Senate blue ribbon committee that they immediately conducted an investigation on the NGOs that were allegedly used as conduits of lawmakers’ Priority Development Assistance Fund or pork barrel funds.
“In fact your honor, we had already started since early last year when this matter was first talked about in the media, we had already conducted an investigation on all the foundations (mentioned) in those reports and we did already send people to go to the addresses of the so- called incorporators of those foundations to check whether they are really legitimate persons…”
Herbosa said, responding to queries of the committee chair Senator Teofisto Guingona III.
“We will admit that had we had sufficient resources including computer assisted review, we’d probably been able to detect fraud in procuring registration at the very first instance when they filed applications with us.”
“But as I said, because we’re based on a disclosure system, we only rely on the documents submitted,” the SEC chief added.
Despite this, Herbosa said, they could still detect “certain batches of fraud” simply based on the application being submitted to their office.
“For example, we’ve noticed or even in stock corporations, there could be instances where the TIN is fake or a person would have presented to us several TINs depending on what application they are filing or sometimes they don’t indicate the specific addresses. Things like that which we can see even in pre-registration,” she said.
At present, Herbosa said, their corporate and governance and finance department has only eight examiners assigned to process 10,000 active foundations.
“That’s really a challenge…I think that’s the meat of the problem ,” Guingona said.
“Per our computation, if it’s going to be 200 corporations in a year to be processed by one examiner, we would need at least 54 processors instead of eight,” the SEC chief said.
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