Monday last week the Office of the Ombudsman through Deputy Ombudsman Orlando Casimiro ordered the investigation on the misuse of the Special Education Fund in Davao City particularly on the questionable disbursement of the P11 million that was used to throw big parties and purchases of expensive giveaways in December 2006. The Commission on Audit (COA) in its Annual Audit Report revealed that the Local School Board released P11 million from the Special Education Fund and spent the money in less than just one month. That’s a great waste of taxpayer’s money.
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The Davao City School Board is composed of the city mayor, chair; the city superintendent of schools, co-chair; the chair of the committee on education of the city council; the city treasurer; the representative of the Sangguniang Kabataan in the city council; the elected president of the city federation of parents-teachers association; the elected representative of the teachers’ organization in the city; and the elected representative of the non-academic personnel of public schools in the city – members. Each of them will soon receive subpoena from the Ombudsman to answer the charges in the graft case involving the misuse of the school trust fund.
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It is not known who filed the complaint in the misappropriation of the P11 million Special Education Fund against the members of the local school board. It could be any city taxpayer concerned with the local education system or probably just the Office of Ombudsman itself that initiated the charges based on the COA report that could be verified in the website of the Commission on Audit at www.coa.gov.ph.com., for authentication.
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Under Republic Act (RA) No. 6770 the Ombudsman may investigate and prosecute on its own initiative any person, any act or omission of any public officer or employee when such act or omission appears to be illegal. The issue on the perceived corruption in the disbursement of the Special Education Fund in Davao City had long been published in the periodicals and even appeared in the website of the different media outlets that probably prompted the Ombudsman to take cognizance of the case.
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Councilor Mabel Sunga Acosta, representative member of the city council in the city school board simply brushed off the reported Ombudsman investigation on the graft case against the members of the school board as non issue. She said the COA reports on the disbursement of the Special Education Fund every year and the auditing team allegedly cleared the school board on the proper use of the trust funds.
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But Councilor Acosta may have lost sight of the fact that the COA does not prosecute as it is not a prosecuting body. It simply reports on the violations in the disposal of government assets in public offices and furnishes the different government agencies concerned with its report. It’s up to the prosecuting government agencies to determine if there is probable cause to prosecute the responsible parties involved in corruption depending on the COA findings.
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If the prosecuting arm of the government, after having been furnished with the damaging COA report, does not act on the liabilities of the responsible parties probably for fear of courting the ire of the power-that-be in the government, the case is just left to gather dusts in the shelf of the prosecutor. But that does not mean to say that the COA report has cleared the corrupt officials in the case.
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My friend, the retired trial judge whose identity I am sworn to keep secret, came with his car limping on his gout to my office yesterday, broadly grinning for having been belittled as ignorant of the law by a certain Justice Lopez from Crossing Bayabas. He handed to me a lengthy treatise in his analysis on the Special Education Fund that could enlighten the readers on what this school trust fund is all about.
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The city government collects one (1%) percent from the assessed value of real property in addition to its basic property tax as provided by RA 7160 or the Local Government Code. The collection accrues to the Special Education Fund, the disbursement of which shall be determined and approved by the City School Board for specific purposes such as operation and maintenance of public schools, construction/repair of school buildings, facilities and equipment, educational research, purchase of books, sports development; and other purposes as provided by RA 5447.
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But spending the school trust fund for throwing big parties and for the purchase of expensive gifts to give away on Christmas as in the instant case now being investigated by the Ombudsman is definitely not included in the specific purposes for the use of the Special Education Fund. Thus any violation of the rules governing the disbursements of the school trust fund is criminal.
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My friend’s thesis on the Special Education Fund is quite long, too long to accommodate in this column, but we can pick up the pieces of facts in his treatise as we go by with our articles. One item in the COA Annual Audit Report that may interest the reading public is for the year ended December 31, 2003 particularly the School Buildings Account on Page 12 of the Report under Property, Plant and Equipment Book of Account amounting to P60,081.061.39 wherein the COA noted: “School Buildings Account consists of various building construed and funded under the Special Education Fund. No inventory listings submitted for reconciliation in the Books of Accounts” of the city government. Indeed, where did the school buildings go that the COA could not locate them? This disclosure is just one of the items in the COA report that may be considered actionable by the Office of the Ombudsman against the responsible persons in the anomaly.
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