Senator Bong Revilla has called out Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Francisco Duque for being emotional during one of the hearings involving the Commission on Audit report.
Revilla along with his other colleagues at the Senate did not appreciate Duque’s statement accusing COA of destroying the dignity of the DOH.
“Hindi ito ang oras para maging emosyonal. We need to be rational. We need to be judicious,” Revilla told Duaue.
Duque said in a house hearing on Tuesday: “Winarak ninyo kami. This is really unfair, unjust. This judgement has been handed down without giving DOH the full 60 days for us to give our reaction.”
He claimed that he and his fellow DOH officials have been losing sleep since the COA report started hogging the headlines and continued to go viral on the Internet.
Concidentally, Revilla together with former senators Juan Ponce Enrile and Jinggoy Estrada were tagged in a special COA audit in 2013 over the misuse of PDAF or pork barrel funds to Janet Lim Napoles’ bogus non-government organizations.
In a senate hearing in 2013, COA accused Revilla for funneling their funds to Napoles NGOs.
Meanwhile, other senators also reprimanded Duque.
Sen. Pia Cayetano stressed that has a COA’s mandate to review all government agencies’ spending to ensure transparency.
“We cannot declare that they should not be doing that. That is what they are mandated to do,” Cayetano said.
Opposition Sen. Risa Hontiveros stressed that the pandemic is not “contest on which agency is most hardworking, most tired or most pitiful.”
“Kung may nawarak man ngayong panahon ng pandemiya, ang nawarak ay ang kinabukasan ng milyon milyong ordinaryong mamamayan,” Hontiveros said.
