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THE
Philippines remains a country intending to but not quite
able to lick its corrupt bureaucracy’s ways—and for this
reason, it is still unable to draw larger amounts of aid
from the US-initiated Millennium Challenge Account
(MCA).
Senior
government officials said Friday they met all the
performance parameters the MCA required
Manila
to observe the past two years except one, a failure that
rendered it ineligible to draw more than the $20.68
million it drew from the fund much earlier.
This was
money worth more or less P1 billion when the local
currency was comparatively weaker as it traded for P50
per dollar.
The
local unit has since traded for around P40.60 to a
dollar and is forecast by some analysts to strengthen
further to P38 or even P37 toward year-end.
According to officials,
Manila was expected to pursue a specific number of corruption cases
during the two-year period when the program ran, to
prove its commitment.
“But as
of end-September 2007, the day of reckoning, we did not
make it,” officials acknowledged.
The
requirement was pretty straightforward: Manila only
needed to file corruption charges against a specific
number of crooks in government and then it has the
money.
The
problem was the designers failed to enroll the support
of the Department of Justice whose head, Justice
Secretary Raul Gonzalez, was excluded for some
unfathomable reason, the officials said.
But the
Office of the Ombudsman and its particular focus on
smugglers and tax evaders reported the filing of 82
cases under the Revenue Integrity Protection Service, or
RIPS, program; and 87 more under the Run After Tax
Evaders, or RATE, program.
The Run
After Technical Smugglers, or RATS, program was targeted
to file 61 cases but managed only 60 as of end-February
this year.
At least
28 cases were to have reached the Court of Tax Appeals
during the period but only 11 actually managed to get
there, according to Assistant Ombudsman Evelyn Baliton.
Officials claimed efforts at reforming the government
procurement process works, as this was specifically
designed to thwart corruption with private-sector
participation.
“But the
process, it is now painfully clear to see, did not
reckon on corruption on the basis of
government-to-government transactions,” the officials
said.
They
said this explained Malacañang’s move to abort the
pursuit of 11 programs that would have been funded by
foreign governments; and decided to pursue them instead
under the guidelines of the not-so-new government
procurement procedure.
Even the
United States had to acknowledge the new procurement
program was superior to most programs elsewhere and was
hailed as a model in the region, officials said.
Superior
or not, continued corruption in the government denied
Manila the opportunity to tap into larger MCA aid
packages reserved only for those who transited from the
so-called threshold economies to compact eligible
countries. |
