Senate Minority Leader Ralph Recto on Friday suggested that the Commission on Audit (COA) consider hiring young people to fill its 6,000 vacancies.
Recto, in a statement, said the “taxpayer’s whistleblower” should become a “premier destination” for “talented and idealistic millennials.”
He suggested that the agency conduct a recruitment drive in colleges and universities and fast-track the regularization of casual or contractual auditors.
He said COA performs a very important task, serving as a “tripwire against graft” and should therefore try to improve its low appointment rate of 57 percent. He said the agency has 14,102 positions but 6,070 are left vacant.
The senator claimed that the more than 8,000 COA employees are “overworked and thinly-stretched.”
“They are not mere accountants who look into ledgers. Many are courageous servants, assigned to dangerous places, who put their lives on the line,” he said.
The bulk of COA’s staff is composed of 6,733 auditors or audit examiners but it also has 295 engineers and architects, and 230 lawyers and special investigators. Many are assigned to local governments. The agency is responsible for auditing trillions of pesos spent by 19,081 agencies.
Recto said there should be more auditors in national government agencies, especially those with bigger budgets. He said it is difficult for auditors to keep track of the national budget.
“If the Ombudsman’s staff is being strengthened, if ‘integrity bodies’ in revenue agencies are being given additional funds, if internal affairs units in the police and the military are being beefed up, then all the more that COA, the public’s whistleblower, must have more personnel,” he said. CDG/rga
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