The joke is on us

You cover government long enough, you think you’ve seen every flavor of graft. Then someone liquidates millions to a ghost named “Mary Grace Piattos.”

During 11 days in December 2022, the Office of the Vice President burned through PHP 11.36 million every single day.

Think about the sheer gravity and impunity of that number.

While wage earners in Iloilo and across the regions scraped together whatever they could to survive an inflation-choked Christmas, the OVP was dropping PHP 1.4 million daily just to rent “safe houses.”

The absurdity of these fabricated names is no mere joke, it is a slap in the face to a public starved of basic social services.

The impeachment trial is currently exposing an accountability void so deliberate it borders on criminal genius.

Gina Acosta, the bonded special disbursing officer, is absorbing the legal heat while the architect sits comfortably at the top.

She admitted to handing PHP 500 million in cold cash to Col. Raymund Dante Lachica, an unbonded security officer, directly bypassing the safeguards of Joint Circular No. 2015-01.

Lachica took the cash, allegedly paid the ghosts, signed the acknowledgment receipts, and then simply asked for the receipts back after liquidation.

If the original paper trail vanishes into the pockets of the man who hauled the physical cash, the Senate is left boxing with shadows.

The system is engineered to keep the principal, Vice President Sara Duterte, legally untouchable.

Yet the most chilling revelation was not the money itself, but Acosta’s admission that this receipt-returning parlor trick was “standard operating procedure” back in Davao.

This is the Davao Playbook projected onto a national screen.

If this was how they did business at the local level, this scandal is actually a catastrophic, multi-year failure by the Commission on Audit.

State auditors clearly turned a blind eye to these practices for years, proving that local government impunity doesn’t just vanish when a politician wins a national post — it scales up.

We cannot keep funding these institutional black holes.

This trial proves that current regulations for secret funds are entirely useless when untouchable officials can ignore them without immediate, crippling consequences.

Congress must amend the budget process immediately to categorically abolish confidential funds for civilian agencies.

COA must be forced to implement real-time, unredacted audits the very second a glaring red flag — like a soldier lugging bags of unbonded cash — appears in the ledger.

A government that hides its transactions behind snack food brands holds its citizens in absolute contempt.

We are left footing the bill for the worst kind of theft, wondering who the joke is actually on.