[Pastilan] End the confidential fund madness

The Dutertes and their once-shrouded love affair with confidential funds have paraded in the daylight, reading less like public service than a manual in audacious discretion. 

In Davao City, where the shadow of Sebastian “Baste” Duterte looms as acting mayor in the absence of a father who’s been detained in The Hague and unable to take his oath, the coffers spilled a prodigious P530 million on these opaque allocations in 2024, when he was the elected local chief executive. It was a sum that, in the ledger of ordinary civic prudence, could have funded major projects in many other cities, but here it only fed the family’s appetite for secrecy.

To put this in perspective, about half of the Metro Manila city governments, a cluster of far more urban behemoths, spent only P483.93 million. Yet state auditors declared Davao compliant. Compliance, it seems, has become the moral fig leaf behind which mountains of unexamined cash hide.

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These funds, modestly labeled “confidential” or “intelligence,” are meant to support peace and order, law enforcement, and occasional surveillance. Yet when it far exceeds the annual expenses of others, one must ask a simple question: who truly benefits, peace and order, or political discretion?

From P144 million in 2016, confidential spending under the Dutertes climbed inexorably to P293 million in 2017, P420 million in 2018, P460 million in 2019, and finally P530 million in 2023, holding steady into 2024. For over seven years, Davao allocated over P2.6 billion to these funds, surpassing even Makati, Manila, Quezon City, and Cebu City. The scale alone suggests not efficiency but obsession.

The other half of Metro Manila’s cities reported no confidential fund spending at all. Makati, Pasig, Las Piñas, Mandaluyong, Navotas, Taguig, Malabon, and Valenzuela showed that local governments can function perfectly well without these shadowy slush funds. This proves that confidential funds are more a political convenience than an administrative necessity.

Come to think of it, local governments, agencies like the Department of Education (DepEd), and government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs) do not really need these funds. The spending itself is redundant – any intelligence information they require can be obtained by simply asking the military or those directly involved in law enforcement.

Such funds are often just a way to funnel cash under the guise of operational secrecy. These resources should be confined strictly to defense establishments and law enforcement, the only institutions whose operations genuinely require secrecy, and not to politicians who have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with taxpayers’ money.

Secrecy, like unchecked power, is inherently corrosive. Confidential funds require minimal documentation, including sealed supporting papers, cash advances that can linger for months, and audits restricted to a tiny unit within the Commission on Audit (COA). The rules are designed to obscure, not illuminate. Cash, of course, is the perfect medium for moral flexibility. A pile of bills in the wrong hands will always become a siren song for mischief.

In many cases, the same official or politician approves, controls, certifies, and oversees the liquidation of the fund, all under oath. This is self-policing in its most absurd form, a recipe for what legal minds delicately call “opportunity for diversion.” Broad categories such as “purchase of information,” “prevention of illegal acts,” and “surveillance” invite a creative interpretation bordering on the artistic. How does one audit a ghost informant or a surveillance that may never have happened?

The Dutertes’ fixation on confidential funds is not a quirk but a family tradition. Under Sara Duterte’s mayorship, allocations more than doubled in a single year. All that happened when her father, Rodrigo Duterte, was the president. Then Baste Duterte followed their example.

As education secretary and vice president, she spent P125 million in just 11 days, a speed that would make even a high-frequency trader blush. And so, it didn’t come as a surprise at all when civil society groups, priests, and former government officials filed in December plunder complaints against her, citing betrayal of public trust and malversation.

Our traditional politicians’ love affair with confidential funds illustrates the simple formula of corruption: monopoly plus discretion minus accountability equals corruption. 

Monopoly of resources means the spender controls the money. 

Discretion means they choose how, when, and on what it is spent. 

And the absence or delay of accountability ensures deviations from legality or morality are rarely punished. 

Repeat this over years, and billions – or trillions – of pesos can move with impunity, all under the banner of “operational necessity.”

If secrecy is necessary for certain government functions, it must be married to accountability, a union politicians like the Dutertes have conspicuously avoided. 

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Some local governments have already shown they can do without confidential funds. Yet the sad truth is that the rest of the country remains at the mercy of a system in which secrecy is celebrated, cash is king, and accountability is optional. Just tally up the local governments in this country. Most of their executives are diving headfirst into these wretched confidential funds, treating public money like a private swimming pool.

Until these funds are confined to the few entities that might actually need them, the noun phrase “confidential fund” will strike less as a legitimate instrument of government and more as a polite euphemism for unchecked political license, the sort of discretion behind which mischief dances.

Who do they think they are, James Bond, or just Bond villains with government salaries? Pastilan. – Rappler.com

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