By Malou Mangahas, PCIJ “KAHINDIK-HINDIK” or horrible in English, was how then Commission on Audit (COA) Chairperson Maria Gracia Pulido-Tan described the corruption in pork that her team of 18 COA Special Audits Office staff and a Technical Audit specialist uncovered when they scrutinized pork-barrel projects supposedly implemented from 2007 to 2009. The special audit covered part of the last half of the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration, and Pulido-Tan’s rather colorful description of what had ta-ken place had been promp-ted by her team’s findings: P79.878 billion of pork monies lost to wasteful spending, including P6.156 billion that went to 82 fake nongovernment organizations (NGOs) endorsed by 188 legislators for 772 fake projects designed for fake beneficiaries covered by fake receipts and reports. In recent weeks, COA has set off a series of annual audit reports (AARs) on government agencies, this time on how pork monies were spent during the first half of the administration of President Benigno S. Aquino III. The reports do not present a pretty picture. They reveal how, in about a dozen public agencies that served as conduits of pork or the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PD AF), the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), and other lump-sum funds from 2011 to 2013, COA has already recorded a continuing abuse and misuse of pork. ‘Unconscionable’ Curated, sorted, and analyzed by PCIJ, pages and pages of the COA AARs showed a trail of pork à la PNoy infected by the same corruption that marked the trail of pork à la Gloria. In fact, much like its former chief, COA itself in one of these reports chose a searing description for what has been going on under the present administration: “unconscionable” – walang awa in Filipino. In addition, several COA agency reports noted that despite explicit advisory from the Supreme Court to stop the disbursement of PDAF by September 2013, multimillion pesos of pork monies were still released, while the fund balance for projects not yet covered by Notices of Cash Allocation (NCA) were not reverted to the Treasury, by a number of pork-conduit agencies and legislators. For sure many Filipinos had wanted to believe that the Aquino government’s much-touted “daang matu-wid (straight path)” pledge would mean, among other things, the prudent use of state funds for projects. At the very least, they probably expected that the findings of the voluminous COA special audit report on pork disbursed from 2007 to 2009 would no longer be found in similar reports covering Aquino’s term. Arroyo era findings Released on Aug. 16, 2013, the COA special audit report on corruption in pork under Arroyo noted in part: • About P79.878 billion in PDAF and its “hard pro-jects” component called Various Infrastructure Including Local Projects (VILP) from 2007 to 2009 “were not properly released” and documented by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM). • The funds coursed through seven government corporations and agencies, and 14 local government units (LGUs) were “not appropriately, efficiently, and effectively utilized.” Ten agencies moved the monies to 82 NGOs illegally, or “without any appropriation law or ordinance.” • The NGOs and their suppliers could not be located at their listed addres-ses, had no addresses or only fake addresses, or were located in shanties and residential homes. • Legislators themselves and/or their relatives were incorporators of six of the 82 NGOs; several others had the same officers or interlocking directorates. • The pork projects of these NGOs had ghost beneficiaries, or the same beneficiaries attending two or more project events held on the same day at different locations. One NGO had even submitted “the same list of beneficiaries to two different agencies, and/or a list of beneficiaries taken from the published list of board/bar examination passers for various professions.” • These NGOs and their suppliers had none to negligible equity and gross sales; many had no business permits, registration papers, or track record; several used the same taxpayer identification numbers and issued fake or irregular receipts. Yet still, they secured from P300,000 to P585.4 million or pork funds because they had legislators as “sponsors” and the projects were not subjected to bidding. • About P1.531 billion of pork funds transferred to 55 NGOs “remained completely unliquidated” as of 2013, when the COA report went public, “including P28.605 million for the conduct of three studies which were not at all used.” The liquidation documents submitted by the rest of the NGOs “were found in audit to be deficient or otherwise irregular.” [To be continued]