‘OP secret expenses skyrocketed during Duterte term’

MANILA, Philippines — It was during the term of former president Rodrigo Duterte that the confidential and intelligence expenses of the Office of the President (OP) skyrocketed to billions of pesos, based on figures from the Commission on Audit (COA).

A review of COA’s annual financial reports (AFRs) on national government (NG), which can be downloaded from its website, showed that in 2016 or during the shared term of Duterte and his predecessor, the late former president Benigno Aquino III, the OP only had P715.23 million in “confidential, intelligence and extraordinary (CIE) expenses,” representing 17.78 percent of the NG’s P4.02-billion total for that year. Duterte formally assumed the presidency on June 30, 2016.

In 2017, during Duterte’s first full year in office, the OP’s CIE expenses increased by 252.33 percent or to P2.52 billion, representing 28.05 percent of the NG’s P8.97-billion total that year.

The OP’s CIE expenses slightly decreased to P2.51 billion and P2.41 billion in 2018 and 2019, respectively, before ballooning again to P4.57 billion in 2020, an increase of 89.63 percent from the previous year.

It was in 2020 when the COA started separating in its annual financial reporting the government offices’ confidential and intelligence fund (CIF) expenses from their “extraordinary and miscellaneous expenses (EME).”

Thus, COA’s AFR for 2020 showed that of P4.57-billion expenses incurred by the OP that year, P2.32 billion was for confidential expenses and P2.25 billion for intelligence expenses.

The OP’s CIF expenses in 2020 were the highest in the entire term of Duterte, representing 51.41 percent of the P8.89-billion total CIF expenses of the NG for that year.

The audit body’s breakdown showed that the OP’s CIF expenses in 2020 were way higher than those incurred by the Department of National Defense (DND) and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) that year, amounting to P1.94 billion and P923.42 million, respectively.

The DND has the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the Presidential Security Group and the Office of the Civil Defense as attached agencies, while DILG’s attached agencies include the Philippine National Police