By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
As a consequence of her actions, our uncooperative Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio has forced congressmen to be suspicious and detached from her office’s fiscal agenda for next year.
Many among the public who voted her into office are also curious why she has shunned inquiries into the spending of the Office of the Vice President (OVP).
Inday Sara’s defense that she is being baited into providing her detractors in the House the ammunition to file an impeachment case against her makes her position even more compromised. Why, is she saying that something in her expenditures is tantamount to an impeachable offense?
Despite her earlier defense and submission of required documents, Duterte has been accused of evading scrutiny, leaving critical questions about transparency unanswered.
If it was her attempt at stonewalling an impeachment case before it ever gets started, I believe it has backfired in a far more damaging way: failure in the test of character.
More than stoking suspicion that wrongdoing is being concealed, the VP’s refusal to answer questions disregarded the Filipino citizens’ right to know where their taxes have gone when these were in her hands.
Neither did she win points for the OVP when she surrendered the fate of its budget to Congress based on her flimsy, if not empty, defense of it. She dodged the responsibility to make the OVP work for the people – and that’s just a shame.
It has become an office that is underserved and, consequently, most undeserved.
What’s good for the goose…
Now, let’s go to the budget of the Office of the President and try to apply the same fervor for oversight and reasonable accountability for every peso that sums up to billions from Filipino pockets.
I’m inviting our lawmakers in both houses to answer why the President’s office has escaped the rigorous scrutiny its annual budget so deserves — and for the third year in a row.
Shall we all settle for the answer that it’s by tradition and parliamentary courtesy? Because if we do so much as to take that excuse without so much as a raised eyebrow – then that’s the politics at play we used to criticize the VP in the first place.
Isn’t “what’s good for the goose, good for the gander” in this case?
Pardon for bringing this up, but the OP also has billions in confidential funds, contingent appropriations, and sky-high travel expenses that have splattered across newspapers in the past 2 years. Or am I the only one who remembers?
Budgetary oversight — a function of Congress — exists for a very solid, democratic reason. No office, big or small, should be immune to that. And if the President is respectful of these principles of democracy, then he would agree.
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