THERE is this common and uninformed notion—it is not even an idea, really—that the government will finally come into its own, and politics will finally serve its proper purpose, only when politicians are gone and nonpoliticians take over.
Frankly, I cannot imagine how nonpoliticians can take over if they are not politicians. I know soldiers can. I have seen them try seven times, but without success. It is even harder to imagine, as I will show, how a democratic government is even possible, let alone how reforms can be achieved without politicians doing the job.
The reason is that politics is what a democratic government runs on. Anything else is just business, whose closest analogies are not public service, but rather swindling and theft. Business is crime without guts.
I will give you an example.
One day a friend of mine, Rep. Enrique “Tet” Garcia Jr. of the Second District of Bataan province, read a series of reports, to which no one paid heed: Hundreds of millions of pesos in taxes paid to banks were vanishing. No one knew where or to whom. None, of course, knew how or would admit it.
Checks were paid by taxpayers to authorized depository banks to settle their tax liabilities to, say, the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) or the Bureau of Customs. You can still do it. But the money never got to the BIR or Customs. The money just vanished. Now, if I had read those reports, I would have just fingered the Palace. But the taxes would still be lost and getting lost; the public would continue to be the loser. Worse, taxpayers would be made to pay again. Oddly, the government didn’t try to do that. Hmmmm.
Garcia decided that this was wrong and it had to stop. Just like that: wrong, stop. He did some sleuthing. This is what he found: Syndicates befriend a bank-branch manager, an accountant, a cashier or, heck, the entire bank, and then they pop their proposal: Let’s steal tax payments.
Naturally, the only consideration for bank-branch people is whether they will get caught. Not if everyone shuts up—as far down the branch totem and as far up the pole as necessary were in on the scheme or scam. This was a scheme involving the 4,500 bank branches of 96 banks.
A fictitious deposit account is opened in a bank branch for, say, the BIR or Customs. To activate the account, an unfunded check is deposited in it, but that check is not presented for clearance until a funded check in the same amount is paid by a taxpayer for, say, P200 million. This sum is then written by the branch people on the unfunded check.
Now you have two checks: a bouncy one without money and an authentic one for the same sum. The teller then snatches the unfunded check from the fictitious account and sticks the P200-million check in that account, which now has a real check, with real money behind it. This check is then presented for clearing to the Philippine Clearing House, which is to say the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The check clears. The fictitious account now has cash. From that account, P200 million is allowed to be withdrawn into thin air.
You wonder: Why didn’t the BIR or Customs file tax-evasion charges against the taxpayers, whose tax payments were never received by them? The answer: Possibly because the BIR, Customs or both, under the secretary of finance, were also in on the scheme. That’s what I would say if I got that far in the investigation. Garcia said nothing, certainly none of the insinuations I have just made.
One time, about a year and a half after a tax payment that vanished, such an investigation was made. It appeared in the papers, and then vanished. For that, I would throw in the publishers and editors, who are about as corrupt a bunch of people as you will encounter out of jail. By now I would have been raising hell, but not Garcia. He delved deeper.
Diversions of this type could reach as big as P100 billion a year, he deduced. But, still, he didn’t get mad. Instead, he made this observation to the government, which never knows how much it gets until it actually receives it. It doesn’t know how much someone paid and when, so it can have a kind of running balance and know how much real money it has available at any point in time. Just like every business with an accounting department using banks knows. This is ordinary bank service.
To be concluded on Monday