No ballot, no audit, no problem?

Last Monday, Nov. 2, about 2.2 million registered voters in Iloilo were scheduled to pass judgment on their barangay officials.

That vote never happened. Republic Act 12326 pushed the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections back to November 2028, and the Supreme Court upheld the delay despite four dissents.

With elections parked for five years, public accountability rests almost entirely on paperwork. That paper trail is paper-thin.

A fresh study from Oxfam Pilipinas tracked how 12 barangays across Eastern Samar and Catanduanes handled disaster cash between 2020 and 2024. Under national law, local governments must reserve at least 5 percent of estimated revenues for disaster risk reduction and management. Seventy percent goes to prevention, preparedness, and long-term recovery. The remaining 30 percent stays locked for quick response during an emergency.

Actual spending tells a different story. Cash flowed into relief goods, equipment, and training seminars. Long-term drainage, climate adaptation, and livelihood recovery barely registered. The team did not find a single recovery or rehabilitation expense in any record they checked.

“Preparedness is not only about stocking supplies,” said Maria Theresa Niña Espinola-Abogado, who leads anticipatory action for Oxfam Pilipinas.

The accounting breakdown goes deeper than questionable priorities. The records themselves were fragmented, lumped together, or outright missing. Some village halls provided Annual Investment Programs,which list wishlists instead of actual expenditures. Others relied on scribbled, unstandardized notebooks. Very little of this data reached regional tracking systems. Commission on Audit field reps estimated that only about 5 percent of barangays file reports regularly.

Oxfam cannot confirm if the missing recovery cash was never spent or simply never logged. That black hole is the whole crisis.

State auditors visit barangays roughly once every three years. Stretch an elected term to five years, and an official faces one or two quick audits before ever seeing a ballot box again. A barangay captain can easily spend years running a local disaster purse with no auditor or constituent checking the receipts.

“The fund must be more than a source of relief goods after an emergency,” said Georgina Opinion, Oxfam Pilipinas disaster risk reduction manager.

Across the study sites, farmers, fisherfolk, elderly residents, and people with disabilities asked for livelihood capital, dignity kits, and wheelchair-accessible evacuation support. The ledgers recorded none of it.

Backers of the term extension argue the longer runway lets local leaders run programs instead of campaigns.You can see why: handing out rice packs buys immediate goodwill, while a hazard study or an unclogged drainage system operates silently in the background. In theory, an extra two years gives a leader breathing room to build infrastructure that pays off long after the next election.

Nobody can confirm that progress if the accounting books remain locked in a filing cabinet.

Oxfam’s field sample does not cover every village, and none of its study sites sit in Iloilo. Yet Iloilo faces an identical breakdown one tier up. In Badiangan, state auditors discovered that the municipal hall left PHP 17.275 million—nearly 73 percent of its available disaster reserves—untouched in 2025, repeating a previous audit finding.

The Office of Civil Defense in Western Visayas now requires towns and cities to clear disaster investment plans before touching the money. “If it is not included in the plan, it should not be funded,” said Melissa Banias,the region’s disaster risk division chief.

That oversight needs to reach the barangay level. The Department of the Interior and Local Government and COA Western Visayas owe residents direct answers to three basic questions:

How many Iloilo barangays submitted complete disaster fund reports for 2025?

How many faced a real audit?

Where can a taxpayer inspect those files?

Fixing this does not require a fresh law from Malacañang. Municipal halls can verify local ledgers, train village treasurers, and bring residents into budgeting sessions. The semi-annual barangay assembly already gives officials a legal platform to walk neighbors through the disaster ledger line by line.

“Communities must be able to see where the money goes and have a real voice in deciding which risks are addressed,” Opinion said.

Lawmakers and the high court handed village leaders two extra years free from voter scrutiny. That leaves taxpayers two more years to demand an answer: Diin nagakadto ang kwarta?