A House panel has once again requested the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) to verify the identities of 1,992 individuals who received confidential funds from the Office of the Vice President (OVP) between December 2022 and September 2023.
The 1,992 individuals were signatories on the acknowledgement receipts submitted by the OVP to the Commission on Audit (COA) for the liquidation of its confidential funds.
The request follows a previous PSA confirmation that at least 405 individuals who received confidential funds from the Department of Education (DepEd) during Vice President Sara Duterte’s tenure as secretary had no birth records.
These individuals were also signatories on the OVP’s acknowledgement receipts submitted to COA. In a letter dated December 9, House Good Government and Public Accountability Committee Chairperson, Manila Rep. Joel Chua, asked National Statistician and Civil Registrar General Claire Dennis Mapa to verify the civil registry documents (birth, marriage, and death certificates) of the individuals listed in the OVP receipts.
“May we request for the verification of the Civil Registry Documents of the names in the attached list relative to the investigation being conducted by the committee,” Rep. Chua wrote.
“A certification that these names are not in the PSA database would bolster suspicions that they do not exist and that the acknowledgement receipts (ARs) were fabricated to justify confidential fund expenditures by the OVP and DepEd under Vice President Duterte.”
PSA had previously stated that one of the signatories on the receipts, identified as Mary Grace Piattos, had no civil registry documents on record.
The Chua-led panel earlier revealed that both the OVP and DepEd submitted flawed ARs for liquidating confidential funds, citing issues such as incorrect dates, unreadable or unnamed signatories, and other inconsistencies.
