Martires wants zero confidential funds for Ombudsman’s office

OMBUDSMAN Samuel Martires on Tuesday night asked the House Committee on Appropriations to completely remove any allocation for confidential funds from the Office of the Ombudsman’s P5.824 billion proposed budget for 2025.

“I will appreciate really if Congress will remove the confidential fund from our budget,” Martires said during the budget briefing, responding to Rep. France Castro (PL, ACT), who tackled the Ombudsman’s P31 million and P51 million confidential fund allocations for fiscal years 2023 and 2024, respectively.

The Ombudsman said he would rather forego having a confidential fund until the end of his term instead of having it and “people will be raising their eyebrows.”

“Kumakain ako sa restaurant, (tapos) sasabihin ng tao na iyong tubig na iniinom ko ay galing sa confidential fund (I’m eating at a restaurant and people will say that the water I’m drinking came from confidential funds),” Martires said.

Last year, Martires asked Congress to just limit his office’s confidential funds for 2024 to P1 million although Congress eventually approved a budget of P51 million for the item.

The Ombudsman nonetheless asked the committee to consider providing additional funding to put up more OMB satellite offices, hire more lawyers and support its digitalization program, which the panel approved.

“There is a need to hire 60 more lawyers from the present lawyers the OMB have,” Martires said, saying that there are more non-lawyers than lawyers in OMB units involved in investigation.

Castro took note that the Ombudsman’s 1,300 cases for fact finding in the first six months of 2024 is lower by 32 percent from the 2,038 for the same period last year. Out of the total, the Ombudsman completed investigation of 389 complaints for the first semester, which is 21 percent higher than the target at the start of the year.

“To speed up the investigation of complaints, we are trying to merge now the fact-finding office and the preliminary investigation office. So when the complaint is filed, it will be immediately assigned to a lawyer who will conduct a case evaluation, and the lawyer will determine whether to proceed with the preliminary investigation or to recommend for