The Philippine Daily Inquirer, one of the nation’s leading broadsheets,
recently highlighted the exemplary work of COA auditors in an editorial entitled
"Servants of the people." The editorial appeared on December 21, 2008.
The following is the full text of the editorial reprinted with permission
from the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
"Servants of the people
Overlooked in all the political bluster over the seemingly endless lineup of
officials caught with their fingers in the cookie jar of the state are the
silent heroes who made such exposés possible. We don’t mean the politicians
milking the never-ending scandals for all they’re worth, politically. We refer
to the civil servants, the loyal public servants, who by doing their jobs
without fear or favor, provide living testimony that there remain people in our
government who really live by the principles of duty, honor and country.
The people at the top may know the rules so well that they can bend them.
They may know the ins and outs of government so completely that they can mutate
otherwise decent policies into an instrument for clever acts of graft and
corruption. They may be able to influence their subordinates into participating
in their crimes, and partaking of the fruits of their criminal behavior. But
they can never fully cover up what they did wrong; sooner or later, how and when
they broke the rules will be revealed.
The selective memory of officials like Jocelyn "Joc-joc" Bolante, and their
deceit when it comes to their acts, have been exposed time and again, by the
diligent work of government auditors who may not be able to prevent crimes, but
who ferret out incriminating documents and, at times, even preserve them so that
they can be used as evidence to prove official wrongdoing. That is why whether
through claims of executive privilege, or the outright destruction or
falsification of records, so much official energy is used up to hide and keep
hidden the paper trail. Because that paper trail, sooner or later, will lead to
the crooks—and their allies and godfathers in government.
Officials, high and low, often forget the principle of command responsibility
as understood and advocated by President Diosdado Macapagal. During his term, he
proposed that heads of departments should consider themselves responsible for
acts of omission of the officials under them, even if they had no personal fault
or participation in those acts.
He gave the example of department secretaries who he felt should resign
because of major shortcomings in their departments, even if those shortcomings
were unknown to them. In his case, he believed that even if personally honest,
presidents should hold themselves responsible for graft and corruption in their
administrations.
But, of course, both in his time and since, advocating command responsibility
is one thing; and demonstrating it to and demanding it of subordinates is
another. Filipinos of an older generation will recall the sensational Stonehill
case, in which the American tobacco magnate Harry Stonehill’s "donations" to a
dizzying number of officials were exposed. The Macapagal administration barely
survived the political fallout from the exposé.
Macapagal ended up deporting Stonehill to prevent his testifying before
Congress, while his administration dragged in both the living (his Vice
President Emmanuel Pelaez) and the dead (Manila mayor Arsenio Lacson and even
his widow) in what came to be known as squid tactics to becloud the evidence and
the issues.
It can even be said that the blueprint for the Garcis and the Joc-jocs of
today surviving public investigations was drawn up in the 1960s. Then, as now,
however, official wrongdoing may never be punished. However, because of our
civil servants who take their responsibilities seriously, there could be a paper
trail of evidence that can at least reassure decent-minded citizens that no
crime can go unexposed for long.
The defect, then, doesn’t lie in our civil servants, or at least in the
auditors charged with keeping tabs on the paper trail, but rather, on a justice
system which can be regularly confronted with mountains of evidence, but which
never seems capable of sending more than a tiny fraction of wrongdoers to jail.
But to the auditors, we believe, our nation owes its gratitude. Well done,
good and faithful servants of the Filipino people."
