Governance.

TWO COMPANIES have done what they shouldn’t and couldn’t have. First, they separately paid for political ads for and against two candidates in the May 2016 elections. They should…

Last of Three Parts CAN we trust them with the public purse? At the rate they are splurging billions of pesos on political ads, with nothing or little to show in their asset…

Second of Three Parts POLITICAL ADS are a bundle of the good, the bad, and the ugly. As candidates in the upcoming elections continue to pour considerable amounts of money into…

First of Three Parts TO THE LAST, they sing the same song: They hate corruption. They love the poor. They mean well. They are true. They are good. They are pure. Or at least that…

HEIDI MENDOZA, commissioner of the Philippines’s Commission on Audit, has been nominated to a senior position in the United Nations.

TAKING ON corruption is never easy. After two years of investigation by nearly three dozen lawyers of the Office of the Ombudsman reviewing thousands of documents, the corruption…

EVEN THOUGH the Supreme Court (SC) had declared the pork barrel dead and unconstitutional in 2013, the Commission on Audit’s (COA) Annual Audit Report (AAR) would still show that…

THEY ARE supposed to be top-rate technical vocational institutions (TVIs), which is why they bagged millions of pesos from the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority…

For 2012 and 2013, data from COA and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) showed that TESDA received a total of P427.09 million in PDAF from legislators, including 19 who…

AT THE height of the media hoopla over the pork-barrel scam two years ago, Dennis Cunanan had a perennially furrowed brow that matched a grim countenance. But the Dennis Cunanan…

FIGHTING corruption has been one of the top priorities of President Benigno S. Aquino III. Or so he claims. He bannered the slogan “kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap” during the…

WHEN it conducted its special audit on the disbursement of pork in 2007-2009, part of the methodology that the Commission on Audit (COA) employed was to confirm the authenticity of…

PCIJ SENT 20 legislators implicated in the alleged corruption of pork funds separate letters requesting for comments. Only three responded in writing, a fourth had his chief of…

AS THINGS stand, it looks like the ruling coalition led by the Liberal Party (LP) of President Benigno S. Aquino III has more members implicated in the pork-barrel scandal than…

On Sept. 11, 2013, a day after the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order on all PDAF spending, Binay announced that he had decided to remove pork from the OVP budget.

“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…

CORRUPTION, an apparent eternal scourge of Philippine government and politics, is firmly entrenched in many public agencies.

FILIPINOS CHOOSE the people who will run their government through elections. Yet they do not hold the power to choose who will run the elections. That authority rests on the…

HE WOULD have long left his post at the Commission on Elections by the time Filipinos cast their ballots in the 2016 elections. But chances are some of Sixto S. Brillantes Jr.’s…

THERE ARE clear winners, as there are clear losers, in terms of provinces and congressional districts and project types, in the distribution of over P11 billion in tax money under…

NO LESS than the home province of Budget and Management Secretary Florencio ‘Butch’ B. Abad, head of the architect agency of the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), received…