Most Iloilo City Audit Issues Unresolved

By Joseph Bernard A. Marzan

The 2023 Annual Audit Report (AAR) of the Iloilo City government, published by the Commission on Audit (COA) on Monday, March 2, revealed that more than half of the audit recommendations from past years remained unimplemented.

Out of 95 recommendations issued since 1998, only 40 (42.11 percent) have been fully implemented, while 55 (57.89 percent) remain unaddressed, the report showed.

Recurring issues were identified in property management, financial reporting, and compliance with national laws, particularly in areas such as land titling, fund utilization, and waste management.

In property management, the city government has yet to secure Transfer Certificates of Title for over 2,009 land units, resulting in an understated Land account balance by PHP8.909 billion.

Additionally, incomplete physical counts and reconciliations of Plant, Property, and Equipment (PPE) led to an overstated year-end balance by PHP3.013 billion.

Despite these lapses, some actions were taken, including the titling process by the General Services Office, retrieval of titles by the PPE Inventory Division, and recording of 110 land titles worth PHP643.6 million by the City Accountant’s Office. The city is also working on reconciling and disposing of PPE accounts.

On fund utilization, only 8 out of 74 barangays, which received 155 fund transfers amounting to PHP13.396 million, submitted complete Fund Utilization Reports with supporting documents.

Final demand letters were issued to noncompliant barangays, requiring them to refund the transferred funds.

However, the city government has not provided updates on the enforcement of these refunds.

Noncompliance with Republic Act No. 9003 (Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000) was also noted.

Barangays failed to establish Materials Recovery Facilities, and monitoring reports on compliance with the law were not prepared.

COA issued the city government a qualified opinion, indicating that the financial statements may have material misstatements or lack sufficient and appropriate audit evidence.

However, these findings were not deemed pervasive to the overall financial statements.

This report was made with the aid of the COA Beat Assistant, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Filipino journalist Jaemark Tordecilla through custom GPT that breaks down COA annual audit reports.

The actual 2023 AAR was double-checked against the summaries provided by the said AI program to verify their accuracy.