UNA interim president Toby Tiangco: Wondering. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines–The United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) of Vice President Jejomar Binay on Tuesday trained its guns on the Commission on Audit (COA) for supposedly making an exception of Taguig City in publicizing its audit reports on local government units (LGUs).
UNA interim president Toby Tiangco criticized the COA for not making available on its website its audit report of Taguig’s “billion-peso releases” under the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), or the congressional pork barrel fund which has been voided by the Supreme Court.
In a statement, the Navotas representative asked the COA “why the city of Taguig does not have any audit report unlike the rest of the LGUs.”
“What happened? The year is almost over but there’s still nothing on Taguig. The last one uploaded was for Pasig City on Oct. 1. The rest were, I think, uploaded by batches, on the same dates. Is Taguig hiding something it does not want the public to know?” he said.
‘Sowing confusion’
One of Binay’s known critics, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, was a representative of Taguig, while his wife, Lani Cayetano, is the incumbent mayor.
Tiangco also criticized the COA for “sowing confusion among the people” over the disparities in the way it presented its audit reports on the PDAF for the years 2007 to 2009 and 2010 to 2013.
“I am confused why there are two different presentations on the PDAF audit findings for the years 2007 to 2009 and 2010 to 2012. Is COA trying to confuse the people with these different presentations?” he said.
For purposes of a common reference, Tiangco said that COA should have followed the same presentation it did for the 2007-2009 audit to the 2010-2012 audit.
Raise suspicion
He said the different methods of audit presentations “have clouded the true story behind the releases of PDAF to allies of the administration from 2010 to 2013.”
Tiangco added that no legislators had been charged for misusing the PDAF from 2010 to 2013.
“Until today, no legislator or even other government officials have been charged for the misuse of the PDAF for the period 2010 to 2012, so it raises a cloud of suspicion,” Tiangco said.