Starting with this issue, the Tribune begins publishing the pertinent findings of the Commission on Audit (COA) in their review of the transactions and financial operations of local government units and certain government agencies.
This comes a bit late, as the audit observations and recommendations of the government watchdog with respected to the provincial government of Catanduanes have already been published sometime after July last year before COA suddenly stopped the release of the reports.
At that time, only that of the provincial government and the municipality of Bato had been released on the COA’s website.
According to a recent report on Rappler, the late publication of the Annual Audit Reports (AARs) is due to a provision in the 2024 General Appropriations Act that required all agencies, within 60 days from receipt of the AAR, to submit to the auditing body a status report on the actions taken on the observations and recommendations.
A COA official told lawmakers that they needed to validate the status report submitted by the agencies, hence, the delay.
Usually, the AARs are uploaded by COA as early as July of each year, in the case of this province, its 11 municipalities as well as some water districts and the Catanduanes State University.
And the reports are deemed final, contrary to the claim of a former university official in 2024 who tried to belittle a series of articles on the AAR as premature.
The audit team usually presents itself to the head of agencies and its key officials before conducting the audit and once the report is finished, holds an exit conference with the same set of officials to explain the findings.
That is why at the end of each audit recommendation are the comments and actions taken by the concerned agency, together with the COA team’s reaction.
As pointed out by the Rappler article, a delay means diminished ability on the part of the public to check how government agencies spent the budget allocated to them for a specific year.
“Because the reports provide important details on the use of the budget, including red flags in transactions, they afford a degree of transparency,” it stressed.
So, who benefited from the delay?
The same provision cited by COA as the reason behind the late release of the AARs was already present in the 2022 GAA, it is claimed, but the audit reports were still released as scheduled by mid-year of 2024.
No one else has the power to insert the provision but the lawmakers at the House of Representatives.
And no one at the Batasang Pambansa should blame the public if it suspects that our honorable legislators deliberately chose to delay the release of the COA report so that they would have no need to publicly call out an agency for misspending its budget.
This same silence, and the public’s ignorance of any shenanigan, allows lawmakers to insert excess appropriations of questionable purpose in the agency’s budget, with the tacit consent of agency heads.
There is also the fact that many House representatives, as well as senators, have members of their families serving as chief executives of local government units, whose transactions are discussed in the audit reports and could be affected by its being known by their constituents.
But there is a silver lining in what has happened with the 2023 AAR.
The COA’s release of the reports six months late means that publication by news entities of the key findings, especially on shady deals and corrupt practices, will remain in the voters’ memory well until the May 12, 2025 elections.